Civilization IV vs. V

I tend to go back and forth with these games. I'll play one for a while, then the other. As I play one I see the relative flaws and remember why I was previously playing the other. It's a perpetual motion machine based on greener grass. What is it that makes me ping pong like this anyway? I mean, what's so different and so much so that I'd actually care.

Something that is different about which I don't care is workers. In IV they can cross rivers without movement cost, making them more flexible. In IV they use food, the same way settlers do, so it is tempting to delay them until city size is maxed (ignore this temptation; improved land is what helps your city grow).

Onward to the big things that make me prefer one game over the other, at least temporarily.

Vassals are better than puppets
Puppet cities don't make much sense. They're clearly part of your empire, giving you territorial control, gold, culture, and science. They have a happiness cost. They can be conquered by anyone at war with you without your enemy needing to be at war with another entity. These aren't puppets so much as poorly-managed normal cities.

While some measures were taken to reduce the habit, it's still easy to end up with an empire that is 90% puppet cities. These cities never revolt, under any circumstances. This looks absurd.

Contrast that with vassals, specifically those won through capitulation. A civilization recognizes that it is going to be wiped out, so it cedes some sovereignty to you in exchange for avoiding annihilation. You do not occupy their cities except those which you have actually conquered and kept. They are the closer thing to a puppet, being free to direct their internal affairs but following the foreign policy of their master. Under certain circumstances they can break free, sometimes with the result of war with their former masters. Puppets magically remain loyal to the very end and a civilization can even find itself with only puppets, clearly a ridiculous state of affairs.

For the player vassals also offer some advantages in terms of management. A vassal will defend itself with its own army. That makes them useful as buffers and distractions for the enemy. They will build their own infrastructure. A puppet city is entirely dependent on your army and workers. This means more distractions and more areas needing management. All they save relative to a annexed city is the production orders, but that comes at the cost of being unable to manage population; I'll trade some more micromanagement for the ability to avoid the AI-run city growing out of control. Though, I could use my workers to remove all food-producing improvements around the puppet, so then I've not saved any micromanagement after all.

Finally, I don't like having to keep playing after I've clearly won. Capitulation means that you can deal with a civilization and be done with it without needing to slog through every single city to make an empire of puppets. When you're the dominant power civilizations will tend to capitulate faster, so that again you don't need to slog through every single city to win. You can return captured cities to their civilizations rather than waste effort and resources to develop them to be useful to you.

On this one I have to give the clear advantage to IV.

Tactical combat is fun, but clearly cheating
I prefer the tactical combat of V. It's more interesting to me than smashing stacks into each other. However, it also feels like cheating. The AI is not very good at it. I can't say that the AI in IV is brilliant, but the stack nature means that there are limits to how much I can run circles around it. Economics are much more important in IV as well, since I am going to lose units; even with air superiority there is only so much I can do before I have to risk actual units. Nuclear weapons can eliminate causalities (on my side by making them 100% on the other), but they are automatically killed, so it's not entirely accurate to say that there are no losses.

Any time I've found myself facing multiple economically-superior opponents in IV I find myself longing for the tactical combat of V. It's a handy crutch for bad economic policy, or bad luck. Yet is that crutch a good thing?

I can't quite point to one being better than the other with combat. Combat in V is more fun, but in IV it is more balanced for the AI and makes economic decisions more important.

City States and Trade Routes
I like city states. They give us something to do to hurt other civilizations that aren't war. However, the AI isn't very aggressive about keeping them on their side, so these tend to screw up the diplomatic victory, which is terrible in both games, and the congress in general. The AI used to try harder to keep them but that changed at some point, I suspect because people got mad at perpetual coups and the AI's bottomless treasuries. City States also give us friends of last resort, meaning trading partners of last resort, and can act a bit like the vassals of IV in terms of acting as buffers and distractions.

Trade routes, though fairly recent, make it feel like a more complete game. They add more layers to diplomacy: losing a trading partner is to be avoided, as is having none at all. They offer some interesting choices: maximize gold, science, or spread of religion, or use them internally to boost production and growth.

Obviously this goes to V.

Gold
V gives the player something to do with it. Bribe city states, buy units, buy buildings, and so on. It is a currency that changes how you play depending on how much you have. However, buildings carry a non-trivial maintenance cost, making infrastructure a risky investment. IV instead allows you to trade gold for science or culture production, giving greater flexibility. You can sell off the buildings in V, but that is a ridiculous level of micromanagement for something that used to be a straightforward tradeoff.

This one is going to V. While the science-gold trade is a less-annoying mechanic, the general uselessness of gold in IV has bugged me. If players could generate a lot more with the rush function from universal suffrage, then gold would be worthwhile.


Interface and graphics
 I group these together because the usefulness of information depends on how it is displayed, which is in turn affected by how it can be displayed, meaning the graphical limitations.

The outdated maps (meaning that they don't update until you buy a map or send a unit to look) of IV tend to bug me. Expansion is hard to manage when it is not clear where the borders are. Keeping scouts out there is expensive with the supply cost and a general annoyance. It's harder to see civilization borders in general on the map, perhaps because of the graphical limits. On the other hand, V has a bad habit of not diplaying units or updating tiles to reflect roads and rail, so I'm frequently using f10 to get the hex display, which is ugly and a stupid thing to have to do.

On the other hand, IV has far superior production and happiness management. Being able to queue up multiple buildings is a great thing. Being able to queue up an endless run of a unit makes it easier to manage the logistical side of war. Not having three tiers of what are essentially just barracks means fewer hassles when gearing up for war. Of course needing to switch civics might sound like a hassle as well, but it makes more sense to have political changes to support war than to have, for thousands of years, been on a cultural war-footing.

The combat log in IV is pretty useful for figuring out what happened after dozens of battles scattered across the world. Even better, clicking on a note in it will center the screen on that location.

IV puts AI conversations at the start of the turn rather than the end. This means that if you misclick you can load the autosave and none of your decisions are lost. V places the AI conversations at the end, so you're stuck with either redoing an entire turn or saving the game at the end of every turn. Neither of those are good.

IV tends to look universally ugly regardless of the circumstances, partly due to the graphics quality and partly due to the mess of roads and rail. V is prettier and more nuanced. It shines and sparkles, but cities also burns, the pillaged landscapes are charred and smoking, and nuclear fallout adds a haunting glow. Fallout in IV just looks like any other ugly tile with a patch of ugly layered on top.

Perhaps I should not have combined these. Interface goes to IV, graphics to V.

Performance
IV loads a game in seconds, V can take several minutes. Given how much a misclick can screw things up in either game, but particularly in the tactical combat of V, loading a turn is a huge deal and not an uncommon occurrence. Turns in IV can take very little time, particularly if there are no enemy movements to watch, while they can drag on in V. The start times are much different between the two as well. The only performance issue that I see in IV is when calculating damage from nukes, and since those tend to come out near the end of the game, if ever, this is rarely an issue.

This one obviously goes to IV.

Conclusion
All things considered, there are parts that I like in both of them. Since it is the newer title, V is going to get more developer attention and will most likely continue to gain relative to IV; in its initial state IV was clearly the superior game. If V ran better, and perhaps with a newer computer I'd see significant gains, then I think it would become the superior game by a non-trivial margin. Until then, I think it is entirely a matter of personal preference.

I won; you know it, I know it, vegatable lasagna here knows it

Here's something that tends to bug me in 4X games: when I've already won, but the game won't admit it. Maybe I'm more powerful than the rest of the universe combined, with a major tech lead, and a stable government/happy population/secure culture and religion. There is nothing to make me lose and therefore I will inevitably win. The question is when and how, not if. At that point I'm just micro-managing my way toward a slightly higher score, rather than victory itself.

In other words, the opposite of this:

I feel like everything is spinning out of my control.  I know it’s boring to say this, but the most fun I have with 4X games is when I’m roflstomping over the enemy with ease, not when I’m scrabbling just to stay afloat against an enemy that I have a 2-1 planetary advantage over.  It’s taking a lot of my will to play through this game and not start over.

- Syp

 This isn't to say that I enjoy the perpetual uphill struggle. After all, if I never reach the top, I will never win. I want to struggle up and then fight on the mountaintop with the guy on the next one over. Roflstomping is fun at times, having that last rush to the capitol, running up to the top of the Reichstag and waving a Soviet flag while shooting Nazis. But what is a victory without a struggle? That was a fun mission, but what would it have been without the first one consisting of dodging bullets and hoping to score a gun off the dead guy in line ahead of me?

Designing reward structures is hard

Did you know that President Obama has personally stopped 57 terrorist attacks? I made that number up. Maybe it's zero. Or ten thousand. And that's precisely the problem: it's really hard to reward prevention, or to reward people for preventing what would have happened otherwise (for the example, let's set aside the secrecy issues involved in security). Which of course leads me to Civilization.

I gain standing with city states for clearing camps, if they are targeted. I also gain standing every time I kill a barbarian. I gain standing for liberating workers. So of course I try my hardest to never do the first one. Why would I clear the camp for a short boost when I can farm the stream of barbarians for more rep over time? In fact, why kill them so soon? I'm better off letting them wander into the city state and kidnap workers, then killing them to liberate the worker. In fact, I'm no even rewarded for clearing camps, and I won't do so if my cities are safe, unless they are targeted by the city state. The problem is that I'm not rewarded for an outcome such as "no barbarian attacks for 20 turns" or "no workers captured for 10 turns". Instead I'm rewarded for removing problem, but only when those problems get to be bad, even when the terrible problem was readily preventable.

Similarly, other civilizations are glad if you join them in a war. However, if you win the war too much, they get suspicious. That's right: no destroying the warmongers. Apparently Montezuma is supposed to be defeated, but never permanently, as if he were the Joker. On the other hand, if you just leave them to die, that's cool. Roll in later and liberate their cities and they'll be eternally grateful. In fact, they'll be so happy that they'll vote for you for world leader, which I think is the only way to make that happen. Once again, you're better off letting terrible people do terrible thing and cleaning up afterward.

Often we try to reward the actions that typically lead to outcomes. Killing barbarians is a key step toward making a city state safe from them, and of course they're going to care only if you're killing their barbarians rather than the ones wandering into their rival's land. Similarly, clearing the camp is a way to permanently fix the problem. Yet the permanent solution is less rewarding than killing individual barbarians, despite the fact that clearing the camp is as effective as killing infinite barbarians and liberating every worker, or more so, since no worker turns are wasted.

The city state could reward outcomes, such as no barbarian attacks for 20 turns. Who do they reward? Usually the civ that clears that camp contributed something. But what if the one who cleared it just jumped in at the last moment and someone else had killed every barbarian leading up to it? The second civ certainly contributed more, what with bringing in three archers while the other guy had a scout wander through. How do you track that, damage inflicted on barbarians within two tiles of the city and camp? That seems rather complex, and in fact encourages farming. Players who are behind could try to block other civs to have a chance to get in damage themselves.

Designing reward structures is hard.

Casual evil in video games

We all know that we can do bad things in games. I'm not referring to people an asshole on xbox live or something like that, but to the actual gameplay. It's not even the obvious stuff that bugs me. Yes, in Grand Theft Auto games you can rob and murder people and that's bad, but what would the game be without that? Without the horrible things you can do the GTA series is really just a bad third person shooter blended with a bad driving simulator. I'm instead concerned about the incidental evil, the bad things you can do that the developers might have not even thought of. Yet it is there.

Take the Elder Scrolls games, for example. As in all fictional worlds, there are no psychiatrists. If you're traumatized, that's it; your mind is done for. Your best option at that point is to just embrace it, join a demonic murder cult, and do what comes naturally. And of course you cannot kill the children. You can, of course, kill their parents. In front of them. And then when the guards come you can kill them too. That kid is done for.

Or in the Civilization series there are the casually-committed war crimes. In Civ III I used to intentionally starve foreign cities I don't know if that actually helped with the cultural conversion, but there were definitely fewer foreigners after I got done with them. I tended to run a thriving slave trade as well. These weren't written into the game to fit some karma meter. There is no karma meter. The closest thing is being a warmongering menace to the world and odds are, whoever is calling you that is himself a warmongering menace to the world. It's the pot calling the can of black paint black.

There's another thing: you can shoot at anything if you're at war with it. Generals, well of course! Admirals, duh. Those are both obvious. And then there are the workers. Guys are just trying to build roads and you're ordering air strikes on then. Maybe a missionary wanders by and what do you do? Open fire!

The best part, at least as I roleplay it, is the reason why: they're bored. There aren't any enemy military units, so they're just firing at anything in sight. Some guy is trying to save souls and they're just lobbing shells at him. Odds are his civilization is some backward dump and he's got this great opportunity to leave and we're just shelling everything in sight. It makes me miss how in Civ IV you could use air strikes against improvements. I'd be doing that constantly. Just shoot up all the farms; get jet fighters with the depleted uranium rounds.

This is all beside the times when I go full Honor and get gold from killing units. At that point I see no reason to ever end a war. Why wouldn't I just keep slaughtering people? It's not costing me anything. I need my army anyway, since I need to defend myself from all the people who are mad that I keep starting wars.

[edit] And since posting this I've destroyed the Zulu empire for the sole purpose of stealing their art.

Civlization V: How to be evil

There are plenty of guides for Civilization V.  They'll tell you how to win or what policies to take.  That's nice.  But what if I want to be evil?  We can't all be Washington.  Someone has to be Stalin, or else how would we have the Cold War?  Not sure why he's not an option anymore; that man was amazing at evil and he even got away with it.  So that's what this is for, learning how to be a horrible person in Civ V.

'Pacifism'
The first thing is to remember that war isn't the only way to be evil.  Oh sure, burning down cities and pillaging the countryside is good.  It's a classic.  But it's overdone.  Even if I'm not trying not be evil I have to burn down a city here and there.  Hashtag yolo (I only know about Twitter from listening to the radio, so I'm not sure whether that's one word or two)

Did you know that great generals, while no longer a source of free golden ages, are able to capture tiles?  That's right!  Drop a citadel and you'll gain control of all the tiles around it.  Against other civilizations this will make them very angry and they may even attack you.  Against city states it will cause a huge drop in standing: 50-60 points, possibly depending on tiles taken.  Anyone can conquer a city state, but to be truly evil you leave it just barely alive, with no land, furious but unable to do anything about it.

Sharing intrigue sounds like a nice thing to do.  But remember, these are spies we're talking about.  Maybe your 'friend' is planning to attack an enemy.  Warn them!  With no element of surprise, that war can drag out a nice long time.  No one knows you did it except the ones you warned.  That's right, you get to talk about your friends behind their backs and ruin their plans.  That's so Mean Girls.

Speaking of hurting your friends, why not take theirs?  Some civilizations rely heavily on city states to bolster their economies and defenses.  It would be wrong to attack your friends, but it would be more wrong to buy off the friends they rely on, crippling them without seeming to be a warmongering menace to the world.  They friend will get mad, but bribery isn't illegal.

While you're at it, why not use those spies to stage some coups?  You only have to kill two spies or steal two techs to get a level three spy.  Throw a bit of gold out to up your odds, then stage a coup.  Bribery alone might up your standing, but a coup also drops that of the other civilization.

Of course those city states eventually start to stray.  Don't let them.  Play as Austria and for only a few hundred gold you can turn allied city states into puppets.  Conquer the world without firing a shot.  Then of course kill the rest of it.

Nuclear War
Don't be afraid to go nuclear.  In Civ V there are much clearer patterns of alliances than in Civ V, so you can drop a dozen bombs and suffer no penalties except with the losers you're nuking.  In a recent game I glassed Greece, yet everyone else in the world considered me a friend.  Once again, learn from Mean Girls: You can be as cruel as you want to people with no friends.

Nukes don't just kill units, they also kill cities.  Two or three are enough to make any city vulnerable to capture.  Drop enough and you can destroy a city outright.  Why deal with the pesky razing over many turns when you can do the same in a single turn?

Water doesn't collect fallout (that's why I only eat low-cost Fukushima fish), so feel free to blast away at those coastal cities without fear of slowing down your navy.  City states seem to like the coast, so why not 'liberate' a few?  Sure, their land might be mostly radioactive waste, but you can't burn an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Fallout is useful too!  Think of it as an instant forest tile, slowing down your enemies.  Even better, it has to be cleaned up before tiles can be used.  So, in the interest of a peaceful, nuclear weapons-free world, be sure to drop a few nuclear missiles on the uranium deposits of other civilizations.  Though to be practical, consider atomic bombs: they spread fallout just as well but cost less in both resources and production.

Lazy War
All of this sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it?  Try being lazy for a change.  Let the other civilizations do some of the fighting for you.

Maybe everyone is mad at some distant country.  It would take way too long to get over there.  Ordinarily you might just ignore it.  That's a good start.  But why not actively ignore it?  When other civilizations tell you how dangerous they are and how you should join them in a crusade against evil, offer to join in.  The result is that you get the diplomatic bonus of 'helping' everyone and only the loser that no one likes gets mad.  I usually ask for ten turns to make sure I've set everything up properly.

What is a proper set up?  Gold deals, of course!  Until you declare war you look like a friendly guy.  So go ahead and sell off everything you can, load up your treasury at the expense of the guy that no one likes.  Remember, demanding lunch money is bullying; borrowing lunch money and never giving it back because of changes in management, that's banking.  Which group gets the larger protests?  While you're at it, why not use some of this gold to buy off their allied city states?  "Divide and capture" is a cliche; "unify almost everyone under your banner and murder everyone else" is the cool thing to do.

Sometimes the friendless loser is a little closer.  In that case, round up some fast units and maybe a few archery types.  Watch where your friends are attacking.  When the city starts to get low, finish it off and capture it yourself.

Miscellaneous Evil
I won't take credit for this one, since plagiarism isn't a useful Civilization strat, even if it is bad, but try this out.  Capture a city state.  Sell it to a civ you don't like.  Declare war and capture it.  Liberate it.  Hey, it's just like what we (that is, US) did with Germany!  Though in his defense, Hitler never held international "who has the most faith" challenges.

Avoid agreements that you can't keep.  Not by keeping them, but by avoiding them.  For example, if you settle one city at a time to box in another civilization they're likely to whine about you settling too close to them.  Of course you want to keep doing it.  The solution: don't keep doing it but instead, have already done it.  Don't settle one city at a time; settle three.  You've boxed them in and can now look like an agreeable person when you agree not to settle any more near them.  Of course there is no more empty land...  Inevitably they'll covet lands that you own and invade, allowing you to bravely defend yourself against the cruel aggressors.

Finally, utilize the domino effect.  One city state wants porcelain and gives furs and another gives porcelain and wants gold.  You could bribe them both.  Or, you could bribe the second one, thereby gaining furs to trigger the standing gain from the first.  I think the longest chain I've managed to get was three plus a branch: two wanted gems, the one with gems wanted porcelain, and the one with porcelain wanted something else.  By bribing the right city state I managed to tip four into my camp.  Maybe this doesn't sound evil, but that's because you're a hippie who fraternizes with Southeast Asian Communists.

The winningest civilizations

The two winningest civilizations are in a close space race.  And I guess we're trying to motivate our scientists and engineers to want to get very far away.

The rest of the world is a peaceful, prosperous land where everyone is friends.

Civilization V: Gods and the Kings' Spies

Spies hide out in every corner; you can't touch them no, 'cause they're all spies
Espionage has made a much-needed comeback.  A somewhat lame comeback, but this is Civ V, so it's still an improvement.  I must admit that I found the Civ IV spies to be somewhat annoying.  You'd send this little unit shuffling across the world, only to get caught a turn after entering the next civ's borders.  Missions knocked it back to the capitol, since as we all know, the best place for an agent who successfully completes a mission without blowing their cover is back where they started, with all their carefully generated contacts and hideouts rotting away (that's how I interpret the no-movement espionage discount).

Civ V takes a more sensible approach.  You have your list of spies and you can send them to cities.  They take a turn to move and then take a few turns to set up.  Then they can begin the fun.  Admittedly it's a mostly fire-and-forget process, but that depends on the situation.  You'll want to move them around as it changes even though you won't be managing them turn-by-turn (since then they'll accomplish nothing).

In other civilizations this takes the sometimes-fruitful path of slowly, very slowly, working toward stealing a tech.  It seems to take around 15 turns, depending on difficulty and whether they have theft-slowing buildings.  In effect this a second research path and if you're not playing at low settings you're going to need it.  You can put multiple spies in enemy cities, even of the same civ, to get parallel paths to theft, all of which can bear fruit independently.  This can be life-or-death, and has been for me at least once, when I was falling behind pretty far.  However, if your spy is caught the AI will get pretty mad at you.  I've never seen to lead to a war, but I've not tested the limits, instead switching to another civ.  Still, this can turn a friendly civ to guarded, so it might be a bad idea to spy on your 'allies' (for as much as such things exist in Civilization).

City States are a bit more fun in the espionage arena.  The boring thing is rigging elections.  Send in a spy and he'll try to rig the next round of elections for that particular city state, which are all held at the same time for every city state.  This gives a boost to your standing, if it succeeds.  Other civs may be doing the same and only one will succeed.  The real fun is in the coups.  If someone else has the ally, you can stage a coup, with varying changes of success depending on your current standing.  If they don't like you at all, you're not going to succeed.  However if some other jerk just bought off the city state, a coup will not only put you back on top, it will also knock them way down.  It hurts when this happens to you.  Failed coups will get the spy killed, though they are replaced eventually so it's a temporary loss, though the replacement won't be experienced.

A last interesting bit that I keep forgetting to take advantage of is Intrigue.  Spies can sometimes see what the AI is planning.  Maybe recon with your units shows that Isabella is building a navy, but who is she planning to attack?  A spy could find out, or see inside a civ that has closed borders.  The AI civs sometimes share this information when they find it, which is nice of them.  Though the one time I was notified that the English were plotting against me I was well aware of it since I'd already captured two city states under their protection and was positioning my navy to launch my own attack.

My only major complaint about the espionage system is that it favors players who are slightly behind in tech, but not by much.  If you're too far behind, then you have fewer spies (you get one slot per era starting in the Renaissance).  If you're ahead, then you have nothing to steal and therefore your spies can only get experience by catching other spies stealing tech, and since the odds of stealing and surviving seem to be significantly higher than getting caught, you're going to have lower-level spies.  On the other hand, maybe that's just one more way to keep a game interesting.  It helps keep lower-tech civs from becoming completely left behind.

My God can beat up your god.
Religion is back.  I'm undecided on if I prefer it to the version in Civ IV, but it's certainly a bit of fun and makes for some difficult decisions early in the game.  You first adopt a pantheon which will give a situational bonus, such as more food or culture from particular tiles, improvements, or buildings.  With a prophet you can form a real religion (take that, Greece, you didn't have a real religion, just a bunch of jerks in the sky), which gives two more bonuses.  Finally you can enhance it for two more and then you have a fully-fledged religion tailor-made for your civilization.  Since it gives bonuses you'll want to spread it to your cities.

Spread can be active or passive, both based on converting followers to form a majority in a city.  Cities that follow a religion will exert pressure on nearby cities and if one religion has more pressure than another, then the city will gradually convert to that religion.   If you want to speed it up, great prophets and missionaries can convert a large number of people, often forming a majority right away.  Inquisitors can remove those of other faiths, also potentially converting a city.  I tend to use them for the more dramatic purpose of wiping out the holy city for competing religions, thereby crippling their spread.

I've not seen any religion-based wars, but some of the bonuses will affect combat.  The AI will get mad if you try to spread a competing religion in their lands.  I've only played a few games, so maybe I've just not seen it yet.  Though as of writing this, Sweden has happily adopted my religion in the majority of their cities.  Good thing I slaughtered the Hindus and destroyed their holy city.  I guess I've started all the wars over religion.  I do hate those competing holy cities so much.

I'm not sure how powerful religion is in the game.  The slower rep decay with city states is obviously a pretty big deal, equal in power to the first social policy of patronage.  I tend to go for Ethiopia (Jewish) and pick up the 1% production per follower, since 15% at the max is pretty awesome.  Yet I don't have much to compare it with, since I almost always have my own religion.

Currently I'm playing a game as England, which has no particular benefits for religion, or much of anything else until their longbowmen aka artillery conquer everything flat.  Due to Ethiopia getting in the way I ended up with an awful start and have been a perpetual underdog, with only my constant spying keeping my civ from being irrelevant.  I don't see how a religion could have fixed this.  If anything, atheism saved us a lot of time and money that would have gone to shrines and temples.  On the other hand, having more happiness and production would have been a big help.  Only very late in the game did I manage to crush Ethiopia and start to be a factor in the world.

The sad yet undefeated state of my England is a strong endorsement of the impact of espionage.  At times I was getting half my beakers from stolen tech rather than my own civilization.  Rather than an ignorant backwater waiting to be crushed, we were instead second or third in technology, aided by our spies speaking what must have been perfect Russian.

Why I burn down so many cities

When Jesus quoted Reagan about a city upon a hill, He wasn't talking about Civ V.  Losing a windmill and a hydro plant makes no sense at all.

Civ V: Gods and Kings: Part One: It got better

This was supposed to be one post.  Then I realized that it was giant.  I think this says something good about the expansion right there, that rather than writing a short "I liked/didn't like the expansion", I instead wanted to explain.  I'm actually a bit excited to talk about this game and not in my usual rant about how Civ IV is so much better.  At this point, I think there could even be an actual debate there rather than it being an obvious statement.  Anyway, first up, buildings!  Spies, religion, diplomacy, navies, and whatever else I think of will follow.

I purchased the expansion recently, thanks to a Steam sale.  It was strange timing.  Just that morning I'd been thinking that Civ V was irredeemably bad.  So much was screwed up and the gameplay seemed overly simplistic relative to Civ IV.  The tactical combat was nice, but the empire itself was a trivial matter.  The empire, rather than being the thing that supported the army, was instead a weight.  Only a few units were ever needed, but if I won too much I'd fall into crippling unhappiness and lose the ability to fight.

This has changed somewhat.

Buckets of Buildings
The expansion adds a lot of buildings.  These are linked related to the new mechanics of religion and espionage.  Shrines add faith, as do temples now, with the new amphitheater replacing them in the culture generation role.  Two anti-spying buildings are added, though I suspect I'd need to play on a harder difficulty for them to matter much.  They slow down the rate at which enemies can steal technology, which is only relevant in a sort of bitter spot between totally outpacing them and therefore not caring that they stole railroads with which to flee your giant death robots and being behind them in tech and therefore having nothing for them to steal.

These buildings give me something to do beside spam more unneeded units or generate science.  I feel like I'm actually managing something.  Religion can give bonuses to these buildings, making them worth building if they didn't seem to be already, since at first the 1 faith per turn shrine can seem pretty lame.  There are also a lot of new wonders and some existing wonders have been tweaked a bit.  Some remain generally powerful, just as Chichen Itza (50% longer golden age, though it lost the +4 happiness) while the Hagia Sophia only generates a prophet instead a great person of your choice (aka, an engineer).  Someone apparently noticed that the Hanging Gardens are a sort of garden, so now they give a free garden.

The Great Wall remains overpowered.

Or if you're playing Civ V, Gold Edition is on sale on Steam

And is, for some reason, cheaper than buying the Gods and Kings expansion, which it includes.  Buy more and save $2.50.  I don't understand it either.

Since I know you're all still playing Civ IV, here's a production UI tip

The other day I discovered something by accident that changed everything.  Well, changed something.  It made things slightly more convenient.

If you alt-click on a unit to produce, the city will keep making it indefinitely.  This is upgraded and maintained when more advanced units are available.  Until I discovered this I'd been spamming shift-click when I wanted a lot of a unit.

Even better, if you shift-click and add something after it, once the current unit is done it will build the next item in the queue, and then go back to the infinite unit.  For example, if you wanted to finish the spearman that is almost done and have the city build walls before starting on the next one, this can do that.

Even more better, if you shift-alt-click you can have two units being built in an alternating pattern.  Or add more to change the ratio.  This makes it easier to keep a good mix of spears and axes.

Civ IV has a great production management system.  It's strange that Civ V completely lost this, with a much clunkier queue system.  About the only thing it made better was allowing you to pick city production anytime before the end of the turn rather than forcing a decision at the start.

I don't like having a production UI pop up constantly.  I like being able to make a plan, push it into the city, and focus on something else.  It reduces distraction.  In Civ IV this is as simple as shift-clicking as you go through the build order.  My only annoyance when dealing with pre-req buildings, such as needing libraries to build universities; even if you have the library queued before it, you cannot add a university to the queue until it is done.

[edit] Something else that isn't quite related, but here goes: if you can get to a city screen you can also get to the diplomacy screen.  For example, let's say a window popped up informing you that a fire burned down your forge and offers these options: ignore it (forge destroyed and unhappiness), investigate (forge destroyed and costs 10g), rebuild it (forge saved and costs 50g), and of course examine city, but you only have 40g.  I'd say it's worth much more than 40g to keep a forge working.  If you pick examine city, then hit F4 you'll get to the diplomacy screen.  You can now trade with other civilizations, possibly getting the gold you need.  In a similar scenario, if you get a free tech you can use the option to view the tech tree, then go to the diplomacy screen and trade for something, allowing you to leapfrog further ahead.  Wouldn't you rather have free astronomy than free optics?

What is a turn?

At some point, usually when they were young, most people learned to take turns.  But what is a turn anyway?

In the simplest sense it is "I go, then you go, then I go, and so on..."
Chess has this.  Make a move.  The other player makes their move.  Then you go.

Then there are multi-action single turns, where you may make a move that chains without the opponent being able to respond to the individual steps.
For that, imagine checkers in which you can hop over multiple pieces in a single turn.

Turns may have turns within themselves.  There are macro turns and micro turns.  On the macro level it may be your turn to make the first move, but your opponent can respond in some way, and you can respond to them, yet it is all considered the same turn.
Imagine Magic, in which you may declare attackers, then your opponent casts a spell, which you may then counterspell.  It's all your turn, yet they still make decisions.

A while ago I bought an iPhone game called Dungeon Raid.  It's a match-3 (or more) game layered with an RPG-style upgrading and leveling system.  It uses turns, which are triggered by connecting tiles (coins, monsters, health potions, that sort of thing).  Yet within these turns you can take actions.  I've learned to chain these together into combos that seem to exploit the concept of a turn.

First I use a spell that causes all new tiles to be coins.  Next I use another spell that collects all health potions but converts them to xp, which results in a lot of new coins dropping down.  I follow that with a spell that collects all coins, which are then replaced with more coins.  Finally I convert all coins into monsters.  At this point the turn is not over.  I've collected most of a screen's worth of experience potions and coins.  It is only when I've connected all the monsters to a sword that the game finally counts it as a turn.  Since the new turn hasn't started yet, the new tiles are all coins, so the next turn consists entirely of collecting a ton of coins.

Finally, there is Civilization V.  Against the AI things are pretty clear.  Each player goes in turn, giving build orders, attacking, and initiating diplomacy.  Since one entire side can move in a single turn with no ability for the opponent to react, this makes first strikes excessively powerful, particularly because siege units can attack without taking damage themselves.  The developers may have noticed this and came up with an ingenious solution for multiplayer: players go at the same time.  This lack of turn-taking results in a chaotic mess.  It's like kindergarten all over again and that is why we take turns.  And no pushing.

Wonders are overpowered in Civilization V

When I play Civilization IV there are wonders that I want.  Well of course I want all of them, but some are of particular interest to me.  Notre Dame is one of my favorites, since early on I tend to be limited by happiness.  The Hanging Gardens are oddly-placed, being of benefit in the late game when health is critical, but not as useful early on, particularly since the happiness limit means that the extra population is something between wasted and another lost soul for the whip of slavery.  But I've rambled on.  The point remains that as much as I like most of the wonders, never do I feel as if I am ruined by not having one, or hampered because my enemy does.

Contrast these with the wonders in Civilization V.

50% longer golden ages weren't such a bit deal in Civ IV, where golden ages were harder to generate, but are now able to be triggered at-will from the variety of great people, given as bonuses from social policies, and even built gradually from excess happiness.

The Great Wall, which was once a way to save a bit on early military costs and make defensive wars a little easier, is now a game-changer.  Attackers slow to a crawl, making ranged defenders even more powerful, able to dance around and still fire away.  Facing this wonder without longbowmen or artillery is a huge pain in the ass.  Even with them, you're still slowed, but at least can have some influence over the battlefield.

Sistine Chapel is still essential for a cultural victory, or just to keep up, since social policies are a tech tree of their own.

There are two wonders that give a free social policy.

The Porcelain Tower is notable as well, giving a great scientist (even more powerful now that they are a free tech rather than just a large amount of science) and a large boost to research agreements.  It is only the habit of the AI to declare war halfway into research agreements that keeps this wonder in check.

It might not be overpowered, but it does feel silly, the Hagia Sophia: rush it with an engineer and get it right back, and the next one a lot sooner.  It's either a free wonder itself or it's another wonder free.

Machu Picchu isn't overpowered, but it is rather annoying that it is based on the luck of having a city able to build it, in a location that could build it before the game ends.

Interaction with the code

The games which I played the longest and had the most fun in were also the ones which I could change.  This ranged from elaborate macros in WoW to entire new story lines and ships in Escape Velocity (Mac space combat/trading series from the late 90s).  I don't think this is coincidence.

At first the causality might seem to go from time to code, that more time with a game meant more time to learn it and change it.  Certainly it is true that having more time gives you more time.  I might be going out on a limb with that one.

However, I don't think I'd have spent as much time with these games if I couldn't change them.  Particularly in my days before WoW and Steam, patches weren't very easy to get, let alone know they existed.  If I wanted new content I had to add it myself or look for mods.  In either case, it helped if the game was designed to allow for easy modification.  WoW eagerly accepts add-ons (for better or worse) and has an in-game macro-writing ability.  Escape Velocity was designed early on to readily accept add-ons.  The civilization series didn't have quite the same ease of modification, but with some poking about I could tweak a few things on my own.

The benefits of this come in two categories.  First, it allows for bug-fixing, including those especially annoying things which are perceived as bugs but really weren't.  There is no "working as intended" conflict when you can change things.  One of my biggest annoyances with Civ V  vs. IV was that V didn't have the WorldBuilder, which is an in-game tool to change the map, diplomacy, units, cities, and so on.  With it I could fix some of the annoyances of the AI or the RNG (SPEARMAN DOES NOT BEAT TANK!).  It's a minor thing, but when I'd rush promoting and accidentally give anti-archer promotion to a tank I loved that I could switch to the WorldBuilder and alter the promotions.  That's better than playing with a gimped unit because of a misclick (particularly annoying in a turn-based game) or having to reload from the start of the turn (biggest world possible and it's the very last unit I moved).

Second, it lets the player customize the experience to properly suit them.  In WoW this meant macros that allowed me to survive with a mere two mouse buttons and a scroll wheel.  In Escape Velocity this meant an outpouring of creativity as I designed progressively stranger devices, such as my own version of Project Orion (using atomic bombs to launch rockets: tons of thrust, tons of fallout).

Third (yes I did say two), this gives the player ownership and a deeper connection to the game.  It isn't just something made by someone else and copied a million times.  It's a game that you changed.  It's customized.  Some of your beliefs about game design, some of what you think is fun and should be in games, is in it now.  That's pretty neat.

The Importance of a Base (home) in Games

The other day, in response to Syl, I wrote about the concept of homes in games, places where you can sleep and retain your sanity and perhaps even comfort.  At the time I thought it was merely a pointless concept that is fun to talk about but has no relevance to the actual game or its design.  As so often happens, I was wrong, as proven by the fact that I disagreed.  Homes, or as I will call them, bases, are important in shaping how we play.

I'll use the term bases rather than homes because the concepts are different.  Homes make us feel warm and fuzzy.  Bases are resting points, hopefully safe, where we can refill, restock, and empty our bags.  Stalker has no homes, but it does have bases and those are very important to how I play.

As I depart from Skadovsk, the rusting ice-breaker in a swamp, I save my game.  As I leave I am transitioning between the safe area and the unsafe.  Within there are no stray bullets, anomalies, or mutants.  Outside, there are.  Having a base creates this transition area, perfect for saving the game.  It's also perfect for quitting the game.  As I return or leave there is a clear change in mental state, from the alert outside to the relaxed and more thoughtful inside.  For me, that makes it a good time to quit.  It is a break in the game.

Contrast that with Civilization which doesn't have as clear breaks.  There is the end of turn pause, but that is merely a button press waiting to happen.  And besides, that pause is time for checking on production, making sure nothing was missed.  It is a pause, at most, and definitely not a break.  This is part of what drives the "one more turn" phenomenon, that despite being turn-based and presumably disjointed, it is actually quite smooth, with one action flowing into the next, with no logical point to start.  There is the start of the turn, right after the AI has gone, but that is an even worse time, when you've just seen all the consequences of decisions and have that information fresh in your mind.  To quit then is to discard all you've seen and all you plan to do, in hopes of remembering it later.

I found this in WoW as well.  When I return to a town there are the mailbox and vendor, inviting me to empty my bags and free myself of the worry of those.  There is the inn, inviting me to log out for a while.  The town is safe and there are usually no quests within the town itself.  Maybe there is a quest giver, but the exclamation point will be there tomorrow.  Unlike Civilization there is not a memory loss from logging out for a while.  However, bag space, despite seemingly to be a stopping point "bags are full, gotta go now", is instead a starting point to another task: empty the bags, knowing where to mail items, what to sell, perhaps what to go to the AH for, or if a bank alt handles the AH, then the bank alt has mail to open and bags to empty and auction to post.  Eventually there is a stopping point, when mail and bags are settled and auctions are up.  It may add another half hour or more, but it is eventually there and will nudge you off to dreams of epics.

Guild Wars 2 is different in its break points.  The anywhere AH sale and ability to deposit crafting materials means that I've not gotten into the habit of using bank alts, so I don't have that pull to jump around to clean up everything.  But this also means that cities do not stop me.  A city is just a waypoint away from more questing, so it's more of an inconvenient loss of silver than a note to stop.  Similarly, the heart system means that I won't return to a town to turn in a dozen quests and have that sense of completion and therefore of stopping.  However, since I am unaware of the existence of rested xp, wouldn't want it anyway, and there is no logout timer in the wild, I have little problem logging out wherever I am.  In that regard it is easier to log out, but there is no nudge toward doing so.  There is even a nudge to stay on: since the marketplace is global, there are always buyers and sellers, so odds are, someone is just about to buy your auction if you wait just a few more seconds and maybe you'll get some of your orders filled so you can craft with that and post it which will sell and in a little bit you'll post more buys and pick up those and why does my clock lie to me and claim that hours have passes when all I was doing was picking up my auctions?

I like having break points.  Call it paternalism if you like, but I think gaming would benefit from design bits such as break points which encourage more moderate play.  They don't at all force it, but they help.

European-Style Civilization V

In the world we have seven continents: North and South Americas, Antarctica, Australia, Africa, Asia, and Europe.  Within Europe there are between ten million and one hundred gazillion countries.  Or about 50, but I cannot count past 41.  After that things just get fuzzy and I start to panic.  Within those countries are various ethnic and cultural groups which often seek to divide their countries.  But of course division spawns division so you know they'd just form new groups to hate each other.  It's a fractal of division.

And a breeding ground for war between small countries.

Lately I've been using this as the inspiration for my games of Civilization.  Rather than having a half-dozen civilizations and a dozen city-states, all with room to comfortable build a half-dozen cities, I instead have no city states, replacing them with civilizations, and use a map too small for them.  The result is a lot of civilizations of 1-3 cities, with barely any room at all.  And of course, a lot of war.

The effects can be strange.  While war is generally destructive, having so many civilizations also means a lot of research agreements, so science can move ahead quickly.  The constant war, and constant need for war, means that diplomacy isn't going to keep anyone alive, because no one trusts anyone enough.  Odds are, they've been at war before and will be at war again.  With only a couple cities these aren't big wars, but enough skirmishes to keep everyone nice and angry, but without the nice, so just angry.  City placement is even more important, since if you're only going to get a few, they'd better be great.   While there is temptation to try to get every single tile covered, there is a limit to how close cities can be built and borders can expand far enough that these cities tend not to add much and don't work at all due to the happiness mechanic in Civ V.

Have you found any settings to dramatically change the way you play your games?

If 2 > 1, then I can play Civ V

Are flight paths just lag?

I quit playing Civilization V for a while.  I didn't quit because of the economic problems or the roads costing too much or anything wrong with the game mechanics.  Instead, I just got tired of the performance.  It runs slowly.  Saved games load slowly.  Turns run slowly.  It's all slow.

I was spending a lot of time playing without playing.  Not much fun.

It got me thinking, is this any different than a flight path or any sort of travel time?  Waiting for games to load and AI to move is just that, waiting.  It's not a time of contemplating the difficult tactical decisions that the AI must make (usually incorrectly) or a recreation of the slow communication and slow history of days gone by.  It's just waiting.

So when I get on a flight path and it tried to take me from Orgrimmar to Silithus and I'm going to be waiting for 10-20 minutes (I don't remember, but it's long (which is what she said)), am I seeing the scenery and feeling a sense of distance and size?  Am I in awe of the size of the world and the magical feeling of flight on a magical creature?  Probably not.  More likely I'm tabbed into another window playing TERA (if ya know what I mean (but not that way (seriously that's fucked up, why would you even joke about that?))).  Or I'm tabbed out writing blog posts about flight paths and wondering if they are the same as lag.

Maybe they are different though.  Lag is something broken.  Yes, I know that computing takes time, but in Civ IV everything happens somewhere between instantly and almost instantly, and completely different games (with much prettier graphics) run much more smoothly, whereas Civ V has uniquely bad performance.

Flight paths aren't a technical problem.  They're intentional design.  They're something that developers chose to put there, for some reason.  They're designed to be there, taking scenic routes, adding that sense of world.  They aren't so scenic and worldly after a thousand flights, but without the first one, you're playing Zone of Warcraft and ZOW is a pretty lame game.

My Civilization State of the Union Address

America, I have reigned unchallenged over this nation for thousands of years. I have seen it grow from a single city to an empire as big as any other. I have grown it, but not without your help. You ate a lot of food, but here we are, with large, prosperous cities that can churn out military might, science, and gold.

We have needed all three of those. In our years we have suffered many unprovoked invasions. New York even fell to Russia. But we did not waver. We drew on our gold and we pushed them back. When the Romans attacked their first, second, and third times, we did not yield an inch of territory. They retreated, and with generous peace terms. When the Iroqouis, once our friends, launched a surprise attack, killing many of our brave men and women, we did not waver. Instead, we took the fight to them, seizing lands that they had stolen from Rome and from Greece and we took their capital, forcing them to submit to our desire for peace. But we are not conquerors and oppressors! From these lands we rebuilt the shattered Greek civilization, freeing ourselves from administrative burden and creating a buffer from the warmongering of Rome and Osininka.

Even in our darkest hour, we did not back down. Nation, you remember this. Some do not. Some did not survive to remember. In an unprovoked attack, Russia, our former trade and scientific partner, invaded our southern holdings, threatened New York again, and in an unspeakable atrocity, use three nuclear weapons against Washington, killing millions and crippling the heart of our great civilization.

But we did not waver.

With your help and support, I rallied our troops. We were caught off guard, but we did not stay in retreat. We regrouped and took the offensive. I am proud to announce that we have achieved total sea and land superiority. Our troops are approaching Moscow, to prove to the world that no matter the blow we are dealt, we will always stay standing and never leave justice undone.

I would like to thank the workers from all over the empire, including immigrants from Rome, Greece, Russia, and Iroqouisstanstan, who came to Washington, risking fallout and further attack, to clean and rebuild the land. Your selfless, tireless dedication to doing exactly what I tell you to do is the foundation of this great empire.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that we've almost developed the B52 bomber, which will, thanks to our excellent training facilities, be able to bomb you twice per turn, right off the factory line. So don't mess with us again. If that doesn't convince you, rocket artillery are close behind and I already have several double-striking artillery, even one with increased range. Barring those, we now have secured the Russian uranium deposits and will soon be able to use them to similar effect.

Have a nice day.

The Diplomatic AI in Civ V is Random, Stupid, and Great

Ai in Civilization IV was a nice set of visible equations and with a bit of math you could get along quite nicely. Civ V introduced a new mechanic: random dickishness. Are you five turns in and getting denounced for "trying to win the game the same way"? Or maybe the previously friendly civilization has suddenly turned on you? Maybe you're on your march to victory when suddenly the entire world turns on you.

Sucks, doesn't it?

I think it's great. Let's face it, the world is not run by Kissinger clones who carefully balance practicality with bombing Cambodia for no apparent reason. Instead it is run by people. People get mad and paranoid. They lash out for nothing. They attack when they cannot win and surrender when they could win. They are irrational and random.

The AI system in Civilization captures this very nicely. Is it annoying to get invaded by your friend? Well sure. But you know who hated getting invaded by his best friend? Stalin. By the analogy this makes the AI Hitler, which is why it's okay to kill them.

In RPG terms, the AI lost its aggro table. You can't tank it easily with bribes and religion, though I do miss religion. Instead it attacks, not quite at random, but close enough that you'd better bring some disc priests, which I'm pretty sure means having the Great Wall and a lot of crossbowmen.