Civilization VII has recently come out. The reviews are bad, full of people complaining about how this game has broken the Civilization formula or whatever. For me though, the game was already changed irreversibly for the worse when Civilization V came out——Civilization IV is the best game ever made. Let me ramble about what the Civilization series has lost.
Almost of my arguments basically revolve around stacking units. Civilization V was the first game in the series to remove unit stacking. Each unit has to be on their own tile in V, while in IV you could stack as many units on a tile as you wanted. This is an awesome idea for a war strategy game——the Civilization IV mod “Defense” had a similar mechanic where you would defend against waves of enemies, and you couldn’t stack your units too much because stacking multiple units on a tile would reduce their defensive combat strength. I enjoyed the combat in Civilization V, I used to play the Rome Scenario a fair bit just to be able to enjoy the combat without really thinking about any of the other parts of the game.
However, the Civilization series is not a war strategy game series. It is a 4X game, an “abbreviation for ‘EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate’” your opponents. Combat is intended merely as a means to an ends, the path towards victory. War and victory in battle is not a goal unto itself——the goal of Civilization is to do anything possible to get more land, more power, more science, such that you are stronger than your rivals and closer to your victory conditions.
So in Civilization IV people would complain about “stacks of doom”, and how the gameplay suffered from this, but I disagree. Stacks are a simple, effectively complex and interesting way to handle combat in Civilization, a game where combat is nothing more than a means to an end goal. Let me get to the heart of this issue.
In Civilization IV, the most important aspect of the game is your Macro decisions. You can be building the right improvements, researching the right technologies, building your cities in the optimal places, but all that means nothing if your overarching strategy isn’t sound.
When you play a Civilization IV game, you are the leader of your nation, sitting atop your throne. You tell your troops “go conquer that city,” and all the troops move the way you commanded them to, the dice get rolled, and hopefully your gambit payed off. The fun in this interaction is not primarily derived from the process of the battle, but from its causes and effects. Resources, commerce, technology, production, those are the things you acquire from conquering a city, the actual feeling of the troops matching in and taking out the enemy is not why I’m there conquering the city. Conversely, when someone attacks me or conquers my city, this is a consequence of my diplomatic decisions, or my decision to not devout enough production to building troops——my troops weren’t what failed, my macro decisions were what were wrong.
Since the physical process of conquering the city is not the priority, this act is best left as frictionless as possible. By complicated this process as Civilization V has done by removing unit stacking, the game overemphasizes the micro-decisions of what your troops should be doing in a battle, which ruins the flow of the game. You also cause issues with the AI.
The AI in Civilization V sucks, while the AI in Civilization IV is very competent——even after playing the game regularly for well over 10 years, I still find difficulties above Emperor too difficult to play in typical games. Part of the reason for this is that the Civilization IV AI is very good at war, especially with AI mods installed.
Compare that Civilization V where the AI is simply unable to put up a good fight on the battlefield. This is because of the removal of the unit stacking. The combat has become more complicated but the AI didn’t really become any better——if anything, it became worse. If the AI cannot put up a good fight in war, then the AI lose their teeth and become a joke to the player.
Diplomacy and stuff is also better and more real in Civilization IV, but I can’t really describe that as well. All I remember is really hating getting diplomacy messages about me settling cities too close to their land, thinking back I think that alone might have been what I hated most about Civilization V.
The user interface in Civilization IV is the best interface ever created for any video game. Whenever I boot up a different game, I am always baffled at how sluggish the UI feels. Nothing is as snappy as Civilization IV.
Civilization IV’s screens are also information dense, packed with as much information possible. This lets you quickly make the right decisions. Look for screenshots of the Civilization IV’s diplomacy relations screen to see the kind of interface I’m talking about.
Compare that with Civilization V, the first game in the series to take touch input into consideration. The information density is so much more spacious. I could never find what I was looking for in the UI information-wise. Your score and rival scores are hidden in a submenu by default.
Now, the Civilization series has to also run on tablets and phones and stuff as well as consoles——there is simply no way that the refined, dense interface of Civilization IV can work for these environments. Because the newer games tailor to these platforms that are less suited for playing a 4X strategy game like Civilization, the traditional desktop experience suffers immensely——from what I understand, this problem has only gotten worse with the latest Civilization VII release.
The game also just has to be flashier to appeal to a wider audience. The act of combat has to be enjoyable to pander to players of different types of strategy games——by doing this, they’ve destroyed the identity of the Civilization game.
I may have made an article about that in the past, but I don’t think that entirely! I haven’t played it as much as I should have, but the game Old World (from the same Lead Designer of Civilization IV) manages to make a new game that takes many of the changes that Civilization V attempted to make to the Civilization formula and overcomes some of their shortcomings to truly innovate on the Civilization formula.
First, the AI in that game does not suck at it——instead, I’m the one who sucks and the AI always destroys me in combat.
Second… it’s getting kind of late and I want to go to bed.
I will go back to playing Civilization IV now, good night.
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