TBS Comparing Civ 5 vs Civ 6

[Absinthe]

The Civ 6 thread had a brief discussion comparing Civ 5 to Civ 6. I figured I'd start a new thread now that the discussion is actually going somewhere, in the hopes that some people will weigh in.

I was hardly praising anything. Civ6 wins by default because (vanilla) Civ5 is a stain.

Dude, chill. I know you're new to the Codex, but stop worrying. No one gives that much of a fuck whether or not you like Civ 6, and you get more respect from having backbone and explaining what you're on about than you do from trying to preserve cred and fit in. I never said you were praising Civ 6 anyway. You merely said Civ 6 was better, so I ask why.

Also, I'm not sure whether by vanilla Civ 5 you are referring to Civ 5 no expansions no DLCs (what people usually refer to as vanilla) or Civ 5 unmodded. I'm going to assume you mean unmodded throughout the rest of your post.

The core problem with vanilla Civ5 is the happiness system which makes expanding near impossible or at least non-profitable. As such it is not really a 4x game at all. I know there are mods which try to fix this like the aforementioned Vox populi. These mods usually also overhaul the bafflingly terrible balance of the Social Policy system. Civ6 is better than vanilla Civ5 just by virtue of allowing you to expand.

You can expand in Civ 5 unmodded just fine, although BNW was a bit of a mess. Basically rush Liberty and spam cities asap, and get an early Shrine so you can pop a quick pantheon. Because in Civ 5 Settler production sets growth to zero, reassign all tiles for maximum production (even if it makes you starve with negative growth) because you end up with 0 growth as a consequence of Settler production anyway. Turn your pantheon into Goddess of Love (+1 happiness for each 6+ pop city, which is strong), God of Craftsmen (+1 production in 3+ pop cities, very underrated), or Messenger of the Gods (+2 science for every city connection, which can be a must if you don't have good science otherwise). All of these are pretty strong, but depending on circumstances a faith or culture pantheon can do great stuff too. Get Monuments up fast in all your new cities, since they will fix your tile growth and give you big boosts to SP generation (with BNW flattening culture growth and costs, monument spam is pretty rewarding). And always steal a worker or two from any nearby citystates. Depending on circumstances, you may want to try to rush a Great Library (if you succeed, you're in a good spot tech-wise). With your Liberty finisher you have 3 real choices: Great Scientist (the classic pick - plant it for a science boost to your empire), Great Engineer (if you have a good wonder to rush), and Great Prophet (which is a great way to get a religion while skipping nearly all religious infrastructure, and the #1 thing that makes Tall Liberty an option). Getting a religion is a must, though. For founder beliefs, the big 3 options are Tithe, Church Property, and Ceremonial Burial (only if you are going like 16+ cities), but Initiation Rites and Interfaith Dialogue can be handy in the right circumstances too. For follower beliefs, you usually want Pagodas, but Mosques are nice too. Failing that Cathedrals are an option, as is Religious Community (mostly if you're doing Piety or playing Egypt). Monasteries (depending on wine and incense tiles), Guruship (basically +2 production in every city before long - it is good) and Feed the World (again, if Egypt or Piety) are also strong options. And Peace Gardens is a very serviceable follower belief for when you get Enhancer. Anyway, at this stage we have a lot more happiness to go around, which makes a major difference in wide problems.

After Liberty you should immediately to clear out Tradition (or Piety, for certain faith or culture spam strats), because all of its happiness boosts are global (Aristocracy & Monarchy) and free garrisons is nothing to sneeze at for a wide empire. It's also possible to take Tradition opener first for faster border growth and an earlier boost to culture per turn, which can save you gold on purchasing tiles, while rushing the entire Liberty tree next before moving on to finishing Tradition. This will delay Liberty SPs a few turns, but does give you a lot of extra tiles and increases your odds of generating a natural Golden Age before Meritocracy hits for the extension. Tradition will give you a giant mess of global happiness from Monarchy (and Aristocracy later on) along with a giant mess of gold and faster growing cities (while Liberty also reduces unhappiness). Doing the normal BNW thing, you will generally put all trade routes on internal food bonuses for your capital, which makes Tradition stupidly good.

Once you have Liberty and Tradition up with a religion, you're usually in a very strong position with regards to gold and happiness and pretty much heading for Rationalism next. Wide empires typically also profit off of faith spam (which they can convert into tons of Great Persons) and culture spam (another reason why Pagodas and Mosques are good).

Playing a good wide civ also makes a major difference in Civ 5, like Mayans (Long count and their UB are extremely good in wide), Chinese (Paper Makers are also really good), Byzantines (get ready to spam faith though), Egypt, Celts, Persians, Siam (btw, delaying Legalism and building culture buildings as Siam can make Legalism give you 4 free Wats/Universities, which is stupidly strong), etc. Ethiopia is also funnily enough a rather good option for going wide, since their Stele spam gives you great faith without even bothering with Shrines, which saves on maintenance costs. And of course there are the generally overpowered Civs, like Babylon, Poland, and Korea.

Anyway I've had great results doing full-on ICS style expansion in civ 5 multiplayer, so suffice to say that's still an option. You just gotta know what you're doing.

With that said, happiness has been a pretty stupid system, but it's become significantly more tolerable since they added a bunch of extra happiness sources so that it wasn't strangling you every time you tried to do something. The global happiness vs local happiness clusterfuck introduced later on hasn't helped matters though, which is part of what pushes wide players down Tradition: the need for all the global happiness, but once you have Liberty+Trad the happiness situation is looking pretty manageable. It basically makes all local happiness in your capital worth global happiness instead.

The building with districts and and the policy cards is fine. Not sure what you want me to say about it. It has less depth than Civ4 but there is some.

The districts fuck up and crowd out tile improvements though, and having their costs scale with the amount of technology you've researched is just retarded. (Level-scaling in Civ, it finally happened.) Paired with the fact that ultimately you will be looking to get the same districts for the most part or settling for stuff like manufacturing districts, you end up in a situation where districts don't really improve the way you do shit but just give you other stupid nuisances, liking building districts long before you'll properly use them simply for the production savings or finding out that your current terrain is shit for decent districting.

Not much to say about the new civic tree. It doesn't really seem like a way of managing government so much as it's just a second tech tree now.

The tactical combat system in Civ6 is arguably a bit better implemented with less dominance of ranged units and ability of combine units of the same type (which reduces the traffic jam).

How does Civ 6 fix the ranged unit problem? As far as I can tell, the fact that you cannot attack units if you have 1 move left but need 2 moves to enter their tile means that rough terrain is more ideal for defense by archers since even 3 move units will waste 2 units walking up to the archer and be stuck at the door for the 3rd turn.

As for combining units, it seems more like a very expensive way to get a slightly buffed unit. The main uses I can see are for reducing upkeep costs (hey, it beats disbanding!), defending a high-value tile, and attacking cities, where you want maximal impact the moment your unit is attacking the city. The rest of the time it's actually considerably more rewarding to leave them uncombined and attack separately with both units, which will give you double the attackers to do a lot more damage and have double the health pool. Using unit combination as a way of reducing unit traffic jam is probably one of the worst solutions to the problem, since you're basically sacrificing an entire unit for a marginal buff to its identical compatriot.

 

[Darth Roxor]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

 

[RK47]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

 

[JarlFrank]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

 

[Grunker]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

That's not true. Both are shit, yes, but Civ 6 seemed like an honest effort - they actually added quite a lot of complexity and dialed back a lot of 5's streamlining. Yes, the end result of the balancing effort is that everything feels so minor, trivial and not least samey ("look everyone, we made an INNOVASHUN by turning governance into a second tech tree!") that turns get boring as hell, but I do think there is a difference between two apocalyptically catastrophically dumbed down efforts and then a game firmly in that category vs. a game that tried but failed.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Civ 4 is the last good civ.

 

[Deflowerer]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

That's Gex 2 OST actually, lol.

 

[Absinthe]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

There's value to be had in post-morteming both of them and seeing in what direction they took the game. Personally I'm not too familiar with Civ 6, so I'm a bit curious here.

As for Civ 5, Civ 5 did a lot of stupid things, but that doesn't mean it didn't have some decent ideas at the core of it.

• Trying to settle the matter of doomstacks isn't the worst idea, for instance, but the 1 unit per tile design created a lot of its issues of its own, including archers flattening melee units (a moderate issue), large numbers of units resulting in traffic congestion and AI difficulties (another moderate issue), and a retarded system of tech speed, unit speed, and production rebalancing and city expansion punishing to try to ensure that it is difficult to do too much so that you can't send out too many units out before tech speeds grind your units into irrelevance (a giant fucking problem, and one of the biggest underpinnings of what made Civ 5, particularly vanilla Civ 5, so shit to play), thus attempting to inhibit the creation of huge unit carpets (which I have still done in multiplayer).
• Making tall (a limited number of big cities) a viable playstyle against wide (spamming many cities) is also a good idea (pretty much every Civ game rewards ICS & even Civ 5 couldn't escape this), but using the happiness system to try to aggressively curtail expansion is not. I think it showed that Civ 5 had a number of issues (especially for the AI) when players exceeded a certain game tempo and happiness was a way of forcibly putting the brakes on all of that and getting players to play inside the box. When they started adding a lot more happiness, the game generally did much better.
• Trade routes were an okay idea, especially for rewarding tall vs wide (since they reduced the amount of gold production tiles considerably at the same time), but the implementation of internal trade routes was a fucking abomination, since the ginormous boosts resulted in everyone spamming growth on their capital at all times (or production to rush-build wonders and shit) and making Tradition feel even more stupidly valuable than normal since it synergizes so well with big cities (especially a big capital) and further accelerating tech speeds. Actually using trade routes to trade with other players for things like gold and science isn't a very popular option when growing bigger cities does a better job of providing those same benefits and more.
  
• Social policies weren't an adequate substitute for sliders and government switching options, but doing both Civ 5 Social Policies and perhaps SMAC-style Social Engineering settings and sliders might be a good idea. Civ 5's other major problem with social policy trees is the poor balancing of it, especially the Rationalism tree being stupidly OP (they never fixed this), Tradition and Liberty being the only viable trees early on (Piety became viable as a 2nd tree, depending on strat), and later on they chickened out with the Ideology system which tried to promote everyone just rushing Ideology and ignoring the rest of the trees (Patronage, Aesthetics, and Honor all blow - Commerce has limited appeal, and Exploration is mostly okay for the opening policies, although word has it the finisher's Hidden Antiquity Cites might pay for finishing the Exploration tree with its culture spam). This, combined with the need for advancing tech eras to unlock policy trees, resulted in an ultimately rather linear Social Policy experience (especially since most players tend to disregard Liberty and Piety as viable trees, although in my experience those trees have some rather underrated strengths, even if Tradition is plainly powerful), which makes SPs maximally fucking boring when everyone seems to play SPs largely the same way unless they're being willfully retarded.

Happiness on the whole wasn't a good system though, especially when it comes to obtaining massive empire unhappiness for conquest (which was basically done as a way of unsubtly encouraging players to raze new cities instead of growing too big an empire, but later on the trend hilariously reverses itself with the courthouses basically covering the entire happiness penalty of a new city) and it can become easier, happiness-wise, to expand through conquest than building cities).

 

[Nirvash]

Civ 5 is a massive turd cuz of the one unit/title, war is 10000000% broken shit.

Civ 6 at least embraced being dumb casual fun, like HOI4.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

but Civ 6 seemed like an honest effort

civ has always been "do whatever you want". comes 6, "what if i told you i could cut your research in half if you follow this extremely narrow very specific path?".
this without even considering the ai:
asshole
asshole
asshole
asshole
war
no unit in sight forever
please don't kill me, here have this free stuff

 

[Zeriel]

Civ 6 had a few good design decisions. The alteration of 1UPT, some gameplay mechanics, etc. But it is heavily outweighed by the total lack of an AI that can play the game at all, and the absolutely atrocious art style. Simply too many degenerations in overall quality, which make the end product much worse than Civ 5, even if Civ 5's 1UPT sucks.

 

[Lady Error]

I like the Civ 5 strategic top down view. Have been waiting for one since Civ 1 which also had it as its main view.

Have no idea how people even play Civ 5 or 6 with those horrendous 3D graphics where you have no idea what is where or what is going on.

 

[Utfärd]

Which turd is better and why

It's a crock of SHIT

 

[flyingjohn]

including archers flattening melee units (a moderate issue)

This is a pretty big issue since you have a unit that has no real hard counter and can attack cities/units without retaliation.It transform any strategy game into a range spam.
Coupled with 1upt allowing said unit to be effective in back row makes things even worse.

AI difficulties (another moderate issue)

This is a gamebreaker since it makes the AI unable to play the game.

can't send out too many units out before tech speeds grind your units into irrelevance (a giant fucking problem, and one of the biggest underpinnings of what made Civ 5

Unless you are dealing with 3 tech ahead(and said tech is artillery),this isn't really such a huge problem.But then again,i mostly play modded single and multi so things are probably a lot more different then unmodded.

but using the happiness system to try to aggressively curtail expansion is not

I agree.The happiness system is probably one of the worst attempts at punishing the player in any 4x game.
Not because it is too punishing,but because it is half assed and never accomplishes its goals.

Trade routes were also a decent idea

It was always a bad idea.The moment your trade routes provide any resource except gold is the moment you can abuse them.

Social policies weren't an adequate substitute for sliders and government switching options, but doing both Civ 5 Social Policies and perhaps SMAC-style Social Engineering settings and sliders might be a good idea

Civ 4/SMAC already had the solutions with sliders and government types.All firaxis has to do is expand the government types into micro social policy trees only focusing on said government strengths(no science shenanigans).
I don't think civ 6 solution was really bad,it was just missing sliders and actual negatives to some cards.

 

[Absinthe]

including archers flattening melee units (a moderate issue)

This is a pretty big issue since you have a unit that has no real hard counter and can attack cities/units without retaliation.It transform any strategy game into a range spam.
Coupled with 1upt allowing said unit to be effective in back row makes things even worse.

A melee unit with sufficient exp levels can gain the extra movement point to assault archers (Persians in a Golden Age have it easiest, as all units get +1 movement). You can also use mounted melees. But in multiplayer with simultaneous turns (the default), the stunt is usually to shift-queue movement orders for your melee units so they move into position at end of turn, then immediately attack with them at the start of the next turn. If you're playing in the Civ 5 No Quitters league (which is probably the biggest multiplayer league, and because of Civ 5 MP lobbies sucking, having a giant Civ 5 community to find matches in is important), they will ban your ass for shift-moving though. Honestly, they seem like a bunch of scrubs, and I wonder how they'd react to just manually moving melees into position at the last few seconds of the turn timer, but they do have pretty much the only MP balance mod that actually improves some of the balance (assuming you don't play the retarded new Civs it added) instead of overhauling it like Vox Populi does iirc (good for an improved experience, but not if you just want a rebalanced one), so it can be worthwhile to lift their mod (and not play in NQ league). I'd have to look at what other MP balance mods are around. I haven't played Civ 5 online in ages.

AI difficulties (another moderate issue)

This is a gamebreaker since it makes the AI unable to play the game.

You're absolutely right. I meant it's a moderate issue from a game design perspective (and I never really played Civ 5 singleplayer because the AI was shit on multiple levels rather than just the pathfinding). There are ways to improve AI, pathfinding, and unit mobility so that's it's not as crippling as it is in Civ 5's current incarnation, but the Civ 5 devs failed at it.

can't send out too many units out before tech speeds grind your units into irrelevance (a giant fucking problem, and one of the biggest underpinnings of what made Civ 5

Unless you are dealing with 3 tech ahead(and said tech is artillery),this isn't really such a huge problem.But then again,i mostly play modded single and multi so things are probably a lot more different then unmodded.

The design is such that between slow production speeds (which contribute to that feeling of waiting around to do nothing), the pace of advancement of technologies, and the slow pace of movement speed, it is intended that you are basically sending out something like 2-3 units every 3-4 turns which will need something like 4-6 turns to get them into position and the fighting proper will probably get dragged out for over 10-15 turns. As such, the intention is that your units get outteched before you manage to put too many of them out in the field. This is a deliberate design decision to try to discourage and prevent players from having too many units out, because Civ 5 has no good way of handling that, but of course a skilled Civ 5 player can easily rush out 15+ units every 2 turns, although they will still face the problem of travel times and getting outteched (esp. if you are playing on faster game speeds). This is one of the biggest weaknesses of tall playstyles: getting swarmed by units.

The real problem that I am referring to though is that Civ 5 has a tendency to make everything goddamn slow on purpose to the point that you often feel like you are waiting around doing little to nothing as techs keep advancing. I'm pretty sure there was an intentional ratio of production speeds to science advancement that was intended in order to keep players from expanding or attacking too fast. Happiness isn't the only design methodology Civ 5 used to try to muzzle players.

With that said, there are a number of ways for skilled players to deal with these problems (growth bonuses, production bonuses, and various methods to accumulate gold so you can just purchase units & buildings - the Piety tree also lets you purchase science buildings with faith by using the Jesuit Education reformation belief, which makes faith-spam rewarding).

but using the happiness system to try to aggressively curtail expansion is not

I agree.The happiness system is probably one of the worst attempts at punishing the player in any 4x game.
Not because it is too punishing,but because it is half assed and never accomplishes its goals.

In vanilla it was heavily punishing. They added a lot more happiness sources later.

Trade routes were also a decent idea

It was always a bad idea.The moment your trade routes provide any resource except gold is the moment you can abuse them.

I'm referring to the international trade routes, which just provide gold and science bonuses. Internal trade routes are an abomination, and food and production are exactly what everyone abuses them for. NQ's LEKMOD does not fix this in the slightest.

Social policies weren't an adequate substitute for sliders and government switching options, but doing both Civ 5 Social Policies and perhaps SMAC-style Social Engineering settings and sliders might be a good idea

Civ 4/SMAC already had the solutions with sliders and government types.All firaxis has to do is expand the government types into micro social policy trees only focusing on said government strengths(no science shenanigans).
I don't think civ 6 solution was really bad,it was just missing sliders and actual negatives to some cards.

Not quite sure what to think of the Civ 6 civics solution as a concept, to be honest. But using it as a second tech tree seems like a very lackluster approach to things, and the ability to more-or-less instantly flip around your cards on demand means that anyone who isn't retarded will flip social policy cards into whatever gives you 50% cheaper unit upgrades before rushing upgrades on your army, then flip right back, which undermines the point of even having a card like that. Might as well give everyone cheaper upgrades at all times and be done with it, unless you intend to make it more penalizing to flip social policies. So I think it's clear there are some real problems with the execution, at least.

Civ 6 strikes me as a case of "Complexity is not the same as depth."

 

[civac2]

Civ 6 strikes me as a case of "Complexity is not the same as depth."

That's certainly fair. Civ6 has tons of mechanic and just stuff in general but a lot of it is inconsequential or stupid.

The long build times are probably necessary to avoid an intractable traffic jam (carpet of doom). One of the issues with 1upt. If they don't like full stacking, and it seems many people don't, limited stacking (ie. combining units int corps/bataillons) would still be superior. Civillian units should be completely exempt from stacking rules. It's just silly to include them like Civ6 does.

Tall play is an absurd bugbear. One of the worst things to come from Civ5. It's supposed to be an Empire building game. If tall play is viable it removes the competition for land which is one of the main drivers of conflict in a 4x game. Moreover, tall play runs so counter to every other incentive in such games that you need punishing and degenerate mechanics like Civ5's happiness system to enable it. Btw, Absinthe, Civ4 had the ICS problem completely solved but still allowed you to expand.

 

[catfood]

This is like comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4.

I mean you can do it but why would you.

 

[Fedora Master]

The series died with 4. You may call them Civilization, but that's not what these games are.

 

[Absinthe]

That's certainly fair. Civ6 has tons of mechanic and just stuff in general but a lot of it is inconsequential or stupid.

That was my impression of it too, although there also seems to be a bit of mechanics crowding out each other, like districts vs tile improvements (which also results in tile improvement upgrades that require lots of tile improvements becoming trash).

The long build times are probably necessary to avoid an intractable traffic jam (carpet of doom). One of the issues with 1upt. If they don't like full stacking, and it seems many people don't, limited stacking (ie. combining units int corps/bataillons) would still be superior. Civillian units should be completely exempt from stacking rules. It's just silly to include them like Civ6 does.

The long build times is probably one of the biggest mistakes of Civ 5, and I agree that limited stacking would be vastly preferred to solve the traffic jam issues. Not to mention you can still easily end up with doom carpets in Civ 5. I've done ICS in Civ 5 multiplayer where I ended up with well over 20 cities. Guess what a war looks like. Even outside of that there are a number of ways to accelerate production and buy units so that you crank out units at high speeds. Internal trade routes once again rear their head here (internal trade routes are properly retarded), but even small stuff like a God of Craftsmen pantheon and Liberty dip will make cities noticeably faster at building stuff (let alone the hammer-maxing religion of God of Craftsmen pantheon + Guruship follower belief + Religious Community follower belief, which is seriously underrated).

Tall play is an absurd bugbear. One of the worst things to come from Civ5. It's supposed to be an Empire building game. If tall play is viable it removes the competition for land which is one of the main drivers of conflict in a 4x game. Moreover, tall play runs so counter to every other incentive in such games that you need punishing and degenerate mechanics like Civ5's happiness system to enable it.

No, the main driver of conflict is that there can only be one victor, unless the game allows for everyone to ally together for a shared victory. Civ 5's tall play creates the amusing problem though that it works by rewarding you for having giant cities, but the more valuable you make city yields (esp. pop-independent city yields), the more valuable you make it to plant as many cities as possible, so ICS and even regular expansionism is still totally potent in Civ 5. Your only problem is overcoming unhappiness but there are ways to generate huge amounts of local happiness per city and enough ways to cover the happiness penalty of founding new cities.

The second driver of conflict is that capturing cities is extremely profitable (in addition to hurting your opponent's odds of winning the game).

Btw, Absinthe, Civ4 had the ICS problem completely solved but still allowed you to expand.

There was ICS in Civ 4 too. The rules of ICS are the same: Maximize benefits from having more cities, and spam them. There are tons of people who would claim Civ 5 has solved ICS but the reality is that ICS is still extremely profitable in unmodded Civ 5 also.

 

[civac2]

If you play on high difficulties in Civ4, there comes a point where more cities are not worth it until you have strengthened your economy with certain key techs, city growth and infrastructure builds. ICS in Civ2/3 or Smac is a very different animal.

 

[Eisen]

I started with Civ 5 and was pretty disappointed, haven't played the old ones but someday i will

 

[Fedora Master]

Just play Call to Power

 

[Absinthe]

Wrong decade to make that joke. Nowadays Call to Power looks positively respectable compared to games like Civ: Revolutions, Civ: Beyond Earth, and probably Civ 5 & 6 too.

 

[Arrowgrab]

Civ 4 > Civ 5
Civ 4 > Civ 6

therefore

Civ 5 = Civ 6

There, debate settled.

 

[whydoibother]

Several patches ago, I would've said Civ6 is better for multiplayer, because it desyncs more. These days it keeps desyncing too.
HOW HARD IT IS TO MAKE A TURN BASED GAME NOT DESYNC IN MULTIPLAYER?
TURN
BASED
GAME
How do you fuck up the netcode this bad, for DECADES. For DECADES they can't make a Civilization game not desync, even though you can literally play BY EMAIL.

Nuremberg trials for Firaxis Games lead developers when?