Best Civilization iteration

[eXalted]

Here's a challenge for you:
Play a Civ4 vanilla game. Expansions allowed at your leisure, but no fancy AI mods or any of that stuff. Any world setting you like. Normal sized map. No marathon. Max. Prince difficulty.
Now just play. When you encounter your first true stack of doom, i.e. one so large you find it impossible to beat even if ferrying in troops from neighboring cities, post a screenshot.

In my copy of Civ4, SoD were an extreme outlier under such circumstances, however you 1UPT guys always make it sound so common. I wanna see it with my own eyes...

I don't want to bash on Civ IV and the stack mechanic (I have put enormous hours into Civilization III) but I guess it's just not for me. It seems like there is no strategy in it. You put all kind of units in the stack and when they are attacked, the strongest counter defend and that's it. Just build vaious unit and put them together. That's all.

You might be interested in Realism Invictus. It's generally just a massive expansion for the game. Adds a whole bunch of new techs, units, and concepts. Most notably, it adds in Logistics, which determines how many units you can have in a stack. If the amount of units in a stack exceeds your Logistics number, the entire stack begins taking combat penalties, which go up if you put even more units in the stack. It also has a combined arms thing, where you get combat bonuses for having units of different types stacked together. Pretty cool.

For "Don't touch my vanilla Civ just improve it" mods, K-Mod is definitely the best out there. Massive improvements to the AI, and some pretty cool minor balancing.

Also, I don't know why someone necro'd this thread, but I'm kinda glad they did. Maybe my least-liked (because I enjoy all the Civs) Civ game is 3. It tried a lot of things that just didn't really work. The Golden Age and Great Person mechanics weren't super great, the diplomacy was awful and open to all sorts of abuses, and the AI... A game of Civ 3 was essentially considered over by the time you hit the Industrial era, because the AI wasn't able to wrap its head around the importance of railroads and factories. Civ 3 is also notable for having expansions that arguably made the game worse, and at the very least didn't make it much better. LOL lethal bombardment.

Thank you for the recommendations. They are noted and soon I will try them out. Realism Invictus sounds nice with that Logistics addition. Strange though, I've always looked at Civ III as the one with the best AI. It was able sometimes to surprise me with massive organized attacks, something rare in 4X AIs.

Btw, an interesting (old) presentation about the game AI. Many curious things in there:

 

[sovijus]

I don't want to bash on Civ IV and the stack mechanic (I have put enormous hours into Civilization III) but I guess it's just not for me. It seems like there is no strategy in it. You put all kind of units in the stack and when they are attacked, the strongest counter defend and that's it. Just build vaious unit and put them together. That's all.

Well, what kind of "strategy" would you put in a game that has no tactical combat? I mean you have different unit classes, upgrade trees for them, terrain bonuses, stack counter (in a form of siege engines, artillery and bombers). Seems like Civ4 had pretty elegant combat system for a grand strategy game, that is not orientated towards tactical battles.