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DarkMagicianBobII's Civilization IV (PC)
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| [March 9, 2016 11:03:53 PM]
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CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS ENTRY:
All in all, despite laying down the foundation for one of the greatest games ever, the base version of Civilization IV is rife with flaws, most of which the game easy and uninteresting. The basic concepts, units, buildings, assets, and strategies are there but are rather simplistic compared to what came later. The art design and enemy AI I found incredibly lacking (now that I am spoiled with the modded version), but everything else was just fine, if but a bit clunky. I'd still have fun with this game (definitely more than the abomination known as Civilization V) but I still prefer my improved version, by far.
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| [March 9, 2016 10:59:45 PM]
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Although Civilization IV is my all-time favorite video game, it is definitely not without its flaws. The flaws become even more apparent if you play the original base game without any of the Expansions (Warlords and Beyond the Sword) and definitely not the mods (which are created by the community to balance the game and make it more aesthetically pleasing). Just for a point of reference, I play Civ IV with all expansions and M-Mod (which combines the game balancing mechanics of K-mod and the graphical upheaval of the BAT Mod). The mod can be found here- http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=482015. I also added three custom leaders (Lenin, Hitler, and Meiji) so that all trait pairs of the game (more on that later) could be assigned.
Even though I am the biggest fan of Civ IV in its much improved state, I never really played the original standalone game except for when I played the tutorial (which was a LONG time ago). In this game log, I will be focusing on the original game without even bells and whistles and seeing how it compares to what I normally play with this game. I can warn you right now that it will not be pretty.
A lot of the things that I greatly enjoy using in Civ IV Complete are left out in the base game. For starters, there are no Unique Buildings (UBs) in the base game, only Unique Units (UUs). Civilizations, like the Holy Roman Empire (which came in Beyond the Sword), are only worth something because of their UB. Charlemagne has a terrible trait pair (probably the worst out of all leaders) and his UU (a pikeman replacement) is mediocre. The Rathaus (Courthouse replacement which reduces maintanence costs even further) is the only reason to play the HRE. If this leader were introduced in the base game, he would be slaughtered. UB's give the game more flavor and make playing the different Civilizations a lot more interesting because of that.
Another missing component is three of the traits (which are introduced in Warlords). These traits are Imperialistic, Charismatic, and Protective. Imperialistic leaders can train settlers (which create cities) faster and also produce Great Generals faster (and Great Generals are not even part of the base game). Great Generals give a ton of experience to currently existing units or can give new units two more experience points in one city. The Charismatic trait makes your cities happier and you also gain levels faster per experience point, which allows your armies to grow stronger faster. And the Protective trait (which is considered by most veterans to be the worst) gives Archers and Gunpowder units protective promotions (like city defender) and also allows your cities to build walls and castles faster. Imperialistic is bad because Great Generals don't really do all that much and having too many cities damages your economy, and Protective is bad because it gives no financial advantage and is only really useful if you're on the losing side anyhow. So it can be argued that these traits muddy up the trait pool, but I believe that more variety in anything is a plus. At any rate, the mods I play with strengthen those two traits.
Another aspect of the base game that really irritated me is the fact that the AI in the base game is SO incompetent. Like, REALLY incompetent. For example, they do not know how to use their units to save their lives. They will literally park units in open plains with no hills or forests to fortify in and just allow you to pick them apart one by one. They also do not build enough units to allow themselves to win the game. The AI in the base game also is very easy to bribe and control, and technology trading just becomes a broken mess because of that. The K-mod components I play with make the AI A LOT more brutal and they play like an actual human player would play (perhaps even harsher). They will hardly ever trade techs, they will build units at a hellish rate (even if they are crappy Archer units) in an effort to destroy you with sheer numbers, and they actually know how to fight and use their traits to their advantage. For a comparison I usually play on the level where the AI gets the same benefits as you in the modded version, while in the base game I had to raise the difficulty by two levels in order to be challenged whatsoever.
A final thing that I SORELY missed in the modded version is how the units and cities look. With the BAT mod components, ALL units and ALL buildings of EVERY Civilization get their own unique look so that you actually get the feeling that you are playing an actual real world civilization. For example, the Mongols do not get actual buildings like other Civs but tents (gers) because the Mongols were a nomadic people that were always on the move. Realism is definitely a plus in my book. The scenery and environment also don't look as good in the base game as they do in the modded version because the modded version uses actual images of earth as the basis of its tiles. In the base game, all units (barring the scout and horse archer) look distinctively European and all buildings look Western. Japan looks exactly the same as Spain barring the UU and the color of the Civilization's borders. The animations of units are also downright broken, and sometimes units will walk across the globe during a fight and after a minute or so, die. Glitches abound.
I will now be describing two different playthroughs of the base game. One will be with Japan under Tokugawa on normal difficulty and the other game will be with China under Qin Shi Huang on hard difficulty. In both games, I just mainly pursued a conquest victory without even considering other options. Japan is made for this, while China is meant to turtle up and achieve a cultural victory.
The first game was an absolute bloodbath for the AI. Normally Tokugawa is supposed to absolutely suck because his traits are Aggressive and Protective. Neither give him any advantage in science or production, and are only really useful for warfare. You will tend to fall behind with him because of that unless you get exceptionally lucky. But in the original base game, his traits are Aggressive and Organized. Aggressive gives you faster created barracks plus an additional attack promotion for your fighting units. Organized makes Civics cost much less and also gives you cheaper Courthouses and Lighthouses. As said before, Courthouses decrease how much a city costs over time. The more cities you have, and the further away they are from your capital, the more they cost, and having the ability to cut city costs is definitely a boon for a warmonger. Did I mention that Civilization is more or less an economy simulator?
Anyhow, at the start of the game, there was a field of wheat next to my capitol so I decided to research Agriculture in order to make my first city grow taller. I usually start building a Worker during my first few turns in order to build improvements around my city as quick as possible. My scouting Warrior unit also found the Mining technology inside of a so-called "goody hut" (huts scattered around the map that give the player a certain bonus or just produce a Barbarian enemy). This put me closer to Bronze Working (which allows you create Axeman if you have Bronze in your city borders). I of course made a beeline to this tech after researching Agriculture just to see if I could get lucky that game. And I did; there was Bronze right in my capitol city. The game had given me permission to do an "axe rush". What an "axe rush" is where you build a bunch of Axeman (which have one of the strongest attack powers until the Medieval era and have a bonus against melee units) and just completely annihilate a neighbor (or two).
The poor sap that was next to me was Frederick Delano Roosevelt of America. In addition to being Organized, Roosevelt also has the Industrious trait, which allows for quicker built World Wonders and forges (which boost production on, well, everything). World Wonders are a defining aspect of Civilization games and this game definitely has them up the wazoo. Some of the later World Wonders added in later expansions add more flavor to the game but a lot of the ones in the original game (such as the Pyramids and Stonehenge) are still the more popular ones. A notable difference in the original game is that the Parthenon (which boosts the rate at which you produce Great People) is available when you research Polytheism, while in later expansions it got nerfed in the sense that you could only build it after learning the relatively useless tech, Aesthetics. As a rule of thumb, a lot of the techs added in the expansions are just stopgap techs that prolong when certain potentially game-breaking things could be built.
Anyhow, the closest neighbor I had was only building Wonders (which are ripe for the taking for warmongers) and had very little military prowess. His units were not upgraded with Barracks promotions at all and he only had THREE archers. The Wonder that FDR was wasting his time on was The Pyramids, a Wonder that allows you to have any government civic even if you haven't researched the technology that grants you the civic yet. The main government civics in the game are Despotism (the base one that gives you no advantages), Hereditary Rule (which gives a city one happiness point for every unit stationed in it), Representation (which boosts the science production of Specialists), State Police (which reduces your cities' unhappiness when you go to war and also boosts the production of military units), and Universal Suffrage (gives Town improvements a boost in production and also allows you to use money to "build" things). Since I was a warmonger bent on world domination, FDR was essentially handing me the State Police civic. He never trained an extra unit the entire time I was fighting him and insisted on finishing the Wonder. The fool!
Before I go on further, I should probably explain what Specialists and Great People are. Specialists are citizens that you can train that give certain bonuses to your city. I won't be going into any details but the Specialists are Scientists, Artists, Engineers, Merchants, and Priests. They (and certain wonders) boost the production of Great People points that accumulate over time to produce a new Great Person. A Great Person is essentially a Specialist on steroids and they also have certain functions tied to them. For example, Merchants can perform a mission in other Civilizations and grant you a sum of money. They also can be expended for research of a certain technology. An example of a Great Person in history would be Isaac Newton as a Great Scientist.
After I totally destroyed the American Civilization, and gained the ability to essentially wage an endless cascade of wars, my next target was France. The French leader was Louis XIV, another Industrious leader who also had the Creative trait. Creative gives you bonus when building buildings that grant culture such as Libraries and Theaters. Obviously, Louis was going to be another pushover. I think in all of the time fighting those Civilizations, I lost TWO units, and those units were cannon fodder. I had a total of 12 cities by the time 800 AD rolled around and had double the score of the Civilization in second place.
One of the biggest advantages I had in my wars was Catapults. Catapults, and other siege units, are COMPLETELY broken in the base game. For starters, they can actually kill units in this game. In later expansions, they can weaken a unit up to a certain point but not kill them. In the modded version of the game, Siege units can only get a unity to a maximum of half their health, a far cry from their original power. Another benefit in the base game is that Siege can actually get attack bonuses and not just barrage bonuses. These bonuses level the playing field and make using them way too easy. The main use of Siege units is that when they are attacking a stack of units (both attacking and defending stacks) they can weaken other units in the stack, essentially softening the rest of the units up for a slaughter. They also weaken city defenses created by walls and culture.
The most irritating thing about my conquests is that when I conquered new cities the culture of other, neighboring Civilization would try to take over from the vacant spots of the previous owners. So the culture would surround the city making it unusable for the most part. This was unacceptable, and as soon as I was done killing one Civilization, I was off to the next. The Incans and the Indians were next and neither leader was particularly strong in the base game. In fact, Gandhi is notorious for building as few units as possible, making him an easy target. In expansions, and DEFINITELY in the modded game, the Civilizations that are getting a butt-whooping would submit ("become vassals") to another friendly Civ and the other Civ would then join the war. This hinders the aggressor from landing a final killing blow on the bullied Civ, and makes the game harder. It is debatable if this makes the game more fun or annoying but it definitely creates a sense of realism. The base game has no such system in place so the Civilizations I was attacking couldn't get an ally to defend them. They were helpless.
The game continued in a similar manner until about the 1600s. Since I was playing on a Pangaea map, all of the Civilizations were on one landmass and I didn't have to cross the ocean in order to win the game. I find the whole boats and sailing mechanics of Civilization to be rather annoying, so I don't bother with them. It is aggravating putting units on boats because you can only put one or two at a time, which makes conquering the "new world" that much slower. At any rate, the only two Civilizations left when I won a Conquest victory were Germany under Bismarck and Greece under Alexander. Alexander had the BRILLIANT idea of settling a city right next to my country on the other side of the map, thus crippling his research. He was no threat at all and on the polar opposite end of the map. And Bismarck was just not in the way so he wasn't destroyed. All in all, this game in particular was much too easy.
The next game with China actually gave me a little bit of a hard time and I only quit because I was getting annoyed with how it was going. The leader I was playing, Qin Shi Huang, had the Industrious and Financial traits. The Financial trait gives extra gold on tiles, boosting whatever you are using money for, be it Science, Culture, or just upgrading your units. This trait is always considered to be the best because it is incredibly flexible and makes researching techs a breeze. Did I mention this game was an economy simulator? Also, a fun fact about Qin Shi Huang's image in the game: somehow, the developers screwed up and switched the images of Qin and Kublai Khan of Mongolia, despite the two nations being mortal enemies. Good job, Firaxis. Qin is also another leader who is supposed to suck because he loses the best trait for the worst trait (Protective) in future expansions. Although it is nice being able to defend a city, I'd much rather have guns instead of arrows.
Anyhow, this game wasn't as much of a cakewalk as the other game because technologies cost more for me, and the AI were granted bonuses like having the ability create Archers from the start. It still was just as boring, however. For the first part of the game, I just "turtled" for a while and didn't really focus on building an army. I was able to build Stonehenge and have a stable culture going on while I was preparing for total war. Sometimes you have to give in to a peaceful route, but you have to still build an army, or else you'll end up just like Gandhi >:P. My closest neighbor was Peter of Russia, a Philosophical and Expansive leader. The Philosophical trait boosts the production of Great People and the building of Universities, while Expansive builds workers and granaries faster. Workers, as the name suggests, build improvements, while granaries make your cities grow faster. Both aspects in tandem allow you to build cities and improve cities faster.
At any rate, the AI seemed a lot more competent this round than the previous because Peter had the smart idea of attacking me while I was unprepared, just building infrastructure. But, unluckily for him, I had just placed a city near a horse resource and had the ability to produce Horse Archers which can mow down weaker stacks and have an attack bonus against Siege units (something Peter never produced). Although Peter was the one who declared war, I never lost a unit against him because my cultural borders slowed his units down which allowed my Horse Archers to quickly run over and knock him down. I then turned the war in my favor and sent an army of Siege units and Horse Archers to overtake his cities. It took me much longer than intended because Peter had suddenly got the ability to build Longbowmen (super archers basically), and he actually put up a reasonable defense.
After a brief war, all of the cities near his capitol had been taken over but he was still alive, somehow. I cheated a little and used the World Builder to look at the map to find what cities he had left. Apparently he had one on the opposite end of the map, MILES away from his capitol. This was a surprisingly common behavior in base Civilization. And it was of course detrimental for any AI stupid enough to do that. Even in the Beyond the Sword expansion, the AI was smart enough not to cause their economy to plummet. These little things make the game all that much easier (and more boring). Because I didn't feel like chasing that one city all that way in the middle of nowhere, I ended the war and got some free techs from Peter in the process.
I had trouble deciding what the next target would be, the Incas, or the Malinese. But that decision was quickly resolved when the Incas also declared war on Mali. In Civilization, if you join in on someone's war, they like you more, and it also ensures that you are more likely to get a better piece of the pie. Unfortunately, I underestimated the prowess of the Malinese (and how much unhappiness this war would cause in my cities) so I had to stop and take a breather and watch as the Incas took over all of Mali's best cities. When I declared war again after my happiness leveled out, I had to settle for seconds which were nowhere near as good as Mali's capitol. At the same time, Egypt under Hatshepsut was tied in the lead with me.
Hatshepsut would later be the leader that made me rage-quit the game. Her traits are Creative and Spiritual. Spiritual is probably one of the most boring traits in the game. It allows you to switch between different civics or state religions without suffering a turn of anarchy (where your entire civilization does NOTHING for a turn) and also has double production on temples. It is most beneficial for religious economies where you spread your religion around so that your holy city generates money. For each city that follows a religion, your holy city (if it has the associated religious building generated by a Great Prophet) produces one additional currency point. She had spread Confucianism all across the globe so she was definitely making the moolah. Despite not having any warmongering traits, she was miles ahead of me in technology.
When I declared war on my next neighbor, a surprisingly demure Rome, Hatshepsut actually went in to help Rome fight back against me. I had a hard enough time fighting Rome as is and Egypt had encircled the entire globe in cities. She was sending in Cavalry units while I only had Knights with no guns at all. I knew that I could fight this war until the end but my cities were REALLY unhappy and all had frowny face icons. Eventually she would take back some of the territories I had conquered and put me in a lesser position. The game suddenly became unfun, so I quit.
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DarkMagicianBobII's Civilization IV (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 31 October, 2012
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