I played the original Civilization 1 and 2 and I enjoyed them very much.

I got Civ 4 during the steam sale, and it is making me so furious I want to chuck my monitor out the window. It is the hardest video game I've ever played ever since the 80s when you had a bunch of impossible twitch games with endless levels.

The main thing that makes it so hard, and that is noticeably different than Civ 1 and Civ 2, is that it seems like the default game starts you out with a lot of enemy civilizations and you're all very close together, AND they all decide to go and zerg rush you with centuries of built up units unless you remember to butter them up with tribute and crap every 20 minutes or so.

I have restarted a game from an early save like 3 times, burning through hours and hours of time this week, only to have the hours of planning of city improvements and whatnot get completely exploded when someone randomly declares war on me. And then with the war, it seems like such a delicate thing of probability whether it's possible to defend and counter-attack successfully, or whether it becomes a total goat fuck and you get zerg rushed and completely rolled by a menagerie of medival and modern units.

Each time I restarted from an early save I basically had pre-cognition and tried to act in precisely the right way to specifically not make certain civs declare war on me at certain points in time. But at one point I had forgotten about the civ to the left because I was fighting off the civ to the right, and then the next thing I know, I was getting zerg rushed by non-gunpowder units who still pwned my gunpowder units because of zerg rush.

What's more, I'm not even playing at the middle difficulty level yet.

I kind of feel like all the time I spend planning things out in terms of city improvements is kind of wasted because the game puts so many civs close together and specifically puts everyone on the same continent. I am beginning to think that in terms of strategy you *must* gear up militarily to roll someone, because chances are slim to none you'll be able to get through the whole game ignoring the others most of the time and winning on tech and development. That definitely worked in the older civ games and that is how I used to play. But now it seems like a strategy that strings you along for 3 hours and then completely collapses in the last quarter of the game, so you feel like you just wasted 3 hours on a pointless project.

Have you tried the options where they limit how many enemy civs there are and how close they are to you? Just to get a feel for the game? Civ 4 is very much a different animal from the older civ titles, so getting used to the new interface and way of doing things can help as well.

I guess I didn't see those options yet. I'll have to look for them the next time I start a game.

When starting a new game, one of the options it gives you is the size of the map. Setting it to Huge (the largest setting) will give you more space between you and your neighbors. I think they used an update of the Alpha Centauri AI, though, because as far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to maintain peace with everyone perpetually. Did you get the Warlords and Beyond the Sword expansions?

I hear ya. civ 3 was like that too. what's great also is the ai can run his units all over the map and you can't say shit without just wardeccing him, while if you cross over, it's an instant warning.

WR, I usually play a Custom Game with 300 points of free stuff. That allows me to place a city right from the get-go, rather than wasting time with the Settler. Cause I feel that if you're not super lucky and can't settle on turn 1, you are fucked.

You may also want to beeline your tech research to get a religion as fast as possible. It'll make a big difference, and try to spread it your neighbours with monks if at all possible. That'll save your bacon right there.

The other civs will constantly be evaluatiing your strenght. If you do not have enough modern units to defend yourself, they will attack. You can get away until early medieval without units, but after that they will sense yor weakness and attack. So make sure to have minimum like 2-3 per city. Note that some civs are inherently aggressive. While scouting, if you notice you are next to the Aztec, Charlemagne or people like that, build units! They WILL attack you.

CivIV is indeed a very different beast. It requires a lot of very long-term planning and an understanding of the mechanics.

- You MUST put priority on military spending. To win, you basically must roll over one or two civs in the early game to clear out space. But even when you're playing nice with everyone, the other civs know your military strength and decide whether or not to mess with you based on that.

- Diplomacy is much more important. With a few additional steps, you can make some strong allies (look into religion and trade routes). Ignoring other cultures means you're not getting pulled into that social web, and you're making yourself the pariah.

- Long-term planning is very important. There are actual equations for picking the best spot for cities, especially your first city. Many people begin choosing their second or third technology based on the government and victory conditions they envision for the end-game. Building every wonder (or in some cases, any wonders) can be suicide - you need those resources elsewhere.

I spent a few days reading through civfanatics.com while at work and it really made a huge difference. People absolutely owned the earlier civ games, so I think this one is made on the assumption the player will be planning ahead and gaming the system (imo a bad decision, but there you go).

I've played and won up to one step above the middle. Civ IV is probably my favorite Civ game so far (and Civ III my least favorite - because of their terrible boundary rules. Civ IV allows you to claim a lot more land than any of the previous games, which is fantastic, although I still wish they let you claim your own boundaries like countries do in real life.)

the other way of doing things is to dumb down the gameplay, as to many complains about the difficulty...

all in all, its another case of "silent majority". Basically, all those that found the older games acceptable to play, never bitched about it being to hard or to easy, and therefor did not get counted when the next game got planned.

this is also why special interest groups win out in politics, as those that prefer the status quo do not make their opinions heard (until the change comes into effect and its effectively to late).

there's always civ revolution on the consoles...

Aha, so the software is designed such that you can't go through the whole game without anyone declaring war on you? That's of course very important information pertaining to overall strategy. In my opinion that's very obnoxious, though, because it means they pretty much vetoed an isolationist perfectionist strategy.

I got both expansions. Is it possible to apply both at once, or can you only do one at a time?

Dammit. So basically you have to meta-game hard in order to play Civ IV. No wonder I was having such a hard time.

or freeciv, the open source alternative. Heck, the SDL interface nicely mimics civ4's interface.

Okay, wow. I've been reading CivFanatics.com today and for serious, Civ 4 is much much more requiring of finesse and planning than I ever would have guessed.

Actually, I'm kind of happy about it. I mean, we all complain when retarded console games come out. At least Civ is one franchise that tends towards the difficult and byzantine.

I definitely want to start a new game at the easiest difficult level, though, since the list of things I have to try and plan out is just huge compared to back in Civ 1 or Civ 2.

I used to play Civ4 every week since Day 1 of release and loved it, until Civ Rev came out.
Now, it is my favourite game on the PS3 (which is in competition with all the lego games) and on the iPhone...


Damn, just that made me think of something.
Lego Shadowrun!!! That would seriously be fun, all the carnage with the Lego platformers combined with Shadowrun...


ahhh, too bad it would never get made.

Running Beyond the Sword gives you all the content from the base game plus Warlords plus Beyond the Sword itself. At least I'm reasonably sure that it does.

Civ 4 is difficult in the same sense that WoW is difficult.

There's a metric shitload of data a player needs to memorize in order to play effectively but virtually no "skill". (meaning in this exact case, improvisation)

They're games made to be easy for AI and hard for humans.

Or just turn the difficulty way down.

Yeah, considering how much you enjoy games with tons of complicated rules and requiring way too much thought, you may get a real kick out of it, now that you've found the rules. (However, it's also like 90% strategic and 5% tactical, and I know you enjoy tactical games, so this may be a little off for you.)

That might have been what caused my initial bad reaction, even though at the time I didn't think of it or articulate it that way. I never felt unhappy about banging my head against a brick wall in, say, a ridiculously difficult custom Operation Flashpoint campaign, but that is more tactics than strategy, meaning that you can always try different things to succeed in the situations that arise. In something like Civ 4 which is very strategic it's possible to actually have been doomed due to strategic inefficiencies for the last 2 hours but you just didn't know it, and then after that time has passed no matter what you do you can't get a good result.

That's very true. One of the most important things is where you start off. If you're on some little island, or on a peninsula, you might want to consider stopping and starting a new game. It'll be almost impossible for you to win.

If you are looking for a 4X game with a more tactical focus you should check out sword of the stars.

Its like 80% real time tactics and 20% turn based strategy

Very streamlined no nonsense interface too. (Its designed to be played with time pressure on turns)

Hmm, new site coming soon it says. I'll be sure to check it out a little later.

The wiki is still up, but yeah the new site has been "coming soon" for months.
I think they're busy with other things. They are like, a tiny, no-budget studio.

Another good and quite challenging tactical game is Men of War, a Russian WWII real-time (yet great!) tactical/strategical (more tactics than strategy) game. The game handles a lot of situations, from commando operations to small skirmishes to big defence lines.

Also, you can complicate matters by choosing raging hordes of barbarians and building the great wall. This leaves the barbarians to hit your opponents with. Be careful though, if you don't build the great wall before someone else does.


THat aside, i think CIV IV (and Galactic Civ II too) is one of themore challenging strategic level games out there. I would also suggest a custome game with 6 contenents and 12 opponents. The naval interaction is fun to play around with.


PS:You can load beyond the sword after warlords.

Instead of a lower difficulty you could try a game with enough startup ressources to get a few cities and one of the religions.

You´ll find that many random maps have starting locations that are undesireable at best.

During the Steam Sale I got myself Hearts of Iron III, but haven't played it yet. But Men of War sounds badass, not least because that was also the name of a Dolph Lundgren film. I'll look it up.

Playing Civ4 without another country declaring war on you can be done, but it's difficult.

You just need to always maintain a larger military than the AI and have a more impressive civilization. Of course the trick is figuring out HOW to do that with your cities, resources, and land available to you.

Couldn't you also just declare war on everyone the instant you meet them? If I remember correctly, At War was always a symmetric relation, so this tactic would deny everyone else the opportunity to initiate the transition into At War with you, preventing them from declaring war.

~J

...what? The AI fights just as hard no matter who "declared" the war. It's still a war.

Read the response above mine. StealthSigma specifies "without another country declaring war on you".

~J

Ahh. Excellent troll, sir. 9/10.

No, that won't necessarily work. You encounter the English, declare war on them, but they're allied with the French who declare war on you. Granted, it's the French who aren't known for their military acumen, but still....

I've made it through whole games with no one declaring war on me, but it's sort of tedious. If you keep up a competitive military, try to avoid pissing off nearby civs (or even form an alliance or two!), and keep up with tech, you'll be fine. I recommend using a Custom Game for a few tries before you really dig into the "standard" 8 civ game. You can have as little as one enemy civ on a huge map if you just want to play through a game or two - nobody is going to think any less of you for doing it. It is very much not possible to sit in a corner and tech to victory while ignoring the other civs, though. A strong military is always good. Also, better units do not always win; if the enemy has a 10% chance of victory, and they have 10 units to your 1, they can beat you. 10-to-1 odds is an incredible advantage in your favor, but it isn't assured victory.

Also, if you aren't aiming for a total victory, try to avoid fighting wars to their conclusion. You can usually negotiate the end of a conflict unless an enemy civ really hates you.

Tips for having good relations with other civs:

Build up a military comparable to theirs. They are less likely to attack you if you don't look like a sitting duck.

Try to share a religion with at least one of your neighbors.

Open Borders with whomever you would most like to have an alliance with.

If trying to be pacifist, yeah go ahead.

My advice: If they declare war on you, wipe them out. If they are on your continent, they are your subjects and should be liberated.

I never give open borders, unless they are on a different continent and I want to spread religion/corporations.

It really does depend. Like its predecessors, there's a point at which you stop really recieving benefits from additional cities, so after a point it becomes detrimental to keep fighting (from an economic perspective). If you are stuck with a huge span of arable land between you and your enemy, yes, wipe them out now, while you're geared up. If you can fight them back to a natural barrier, so you have clear, unprofitable borders, it may be easier to just ignore them (with the additional point that focusing your attention on eradicating a lesser foe takes away resources that could be better used elsewhere).

To some degree, the economics begin to suffer. But that is what the Versilles, Forbidden Palace are. This means 3 continents could be completely conquered before the economics start becomming too bad. But my penchant for democracy, emancipation, free markets, and free religion, make my economy humm pretty much no matter what. Wars are pretty tricky, and ending them quicky is a necessity. To accomplish this, I have developed methods to conquer a civ in 2 to 4 turns with tanks, marines, inf and copters.

What if you're forced into a war before you develop tanks, marines, and helicopters?

Typically you aren't running a government type in which war causes domestic problems in a quick fashion.

<dbl post>

Had the same issue with Age of Empires II, go fed up with that game.


Civilization i've always liked. sorry to hear about being ganged up on

To which I add - Never ever play on a Fractal map.

Well, usually that is happening when I am finnishing of my first continent. My advice is to keep at least two units in each city, and have one large stack of 8 or more units taking the other civ down city by city. Also, catapults and trebuchet's are expendable...keep building them until the war is over. Not as quick, but still doable.

Note when upping the units abilities due to xp I use (as I recall them without the game in front of me):
For artillery(cat to cannon): First strikes or City assault
For early meleee used offensively: City Assault, 10% bonus, medic (one or two with medic)
For early meleee used deffensively: City Assault, 10% bonus, medic (one or two with medic)
Cav: Max withdraw, and 10% strength.
Gunpowder:Always give them pinch fire.
Tanks:10% Strength, pich fire, city assault.

Generals:Use them as super specialists 1st.
You can get two good military production city's: In one you'll have West point, and heroic epic, in the other you'll have the iron works and the red cross. You can also further help these cities out by dumping generals there as super specialists. (In the ned you can get 4th level units popping out (with the pentagon).

All this jibber jabber sure makes me glad I've played the Total War series instead of ever getting into Civ.

I played the shit out of both Civ and the Total Wars. They are different. But Civ draws me back more that Total War

I still prefer civ 2/AC over just about any other strategy game I've played. There are a few exceptions I'm likely forgetting... oh yeah, Galactic Civ is fairly awesome too. Never enjoyed RTSs as much because it is alot more about being able to click quickly than anything else.

I may have to go find my copy of CIV IV and try it out again though.

I agree, I always felt that turn based strategy was somehow more pure or superior to real time strategy because in real time strategy you might win just because you click faster. In turn based strategy there's no room for bullshit; either something can work within a given period of time or it cannot. Chess would be silly if part of the game were who could push their pieces faster. Remember the scene from History of the World where the king invokes the royal privledge during the chess game, three moves for the opponent's one?

RTS is the strategic equivalent of FPS. Basically its about being a nth level multitasker that can micromanage the whole map...

Heh, they should force over-the-hill managers to beat Starcraft as part of a new job qualification.

Same here...though I did enjoy the close combat series (OK--really a a tactical game, with no build up), and HOI a RTS with territories). I also liked the TW series, with the turn based strategy level, and tactical realtime battles (which work cause of the army sizes and the fact that they don't go to modern warfare (CA is working on a napoleonics version right now).

I've only played Close Combat 2. It was ok, but the interface wasn't the easiest to use. It was hard to tell apart the different infantry units, and it sometimes felt as if your orders weren't taken into account. As I've said earlier, Men Of War is another excellent RTS (no base/unit building there either, though you sometimes have access to reinforcements). You don't have to multitask and micromanage that much. It's either one or the other (the former for defense missions, the latter for infiltration/skirmishes/assault missions) but rarely both at the same time.