>Filters both?

We like dumbed down Civ because it's a relaxing game. Civ V is zen.

... Huh? I thought we were explicitly discussing how Civ V was dumbed down.

>At some point you have to pick a direction and then have to stick to it.
You don't. Each bonus is mostly standalone. They just have prereqs to keep you from taking things like Theocracy on a whim.
>I accounted for that already. In IV you can do rapid expansion or a big war of conquest at the expense of a huge economic and research slump you have to crawl out of. In V it's impossible without an extra source of happy faces, and almost all of them take a bunch of time to build stuff or build up resources, which defeats the point.
Are you saying you can't win a war without extra happiness, or that you can't make a functional city because you get too caught up in trying to get circus points?
>IV also has that. It also has options to pivot your civ that don't take 50+ turns to prepare and another 50 to pay off.
So does V. They have civilian presets you can use to reorient your city.
>There's a lot of things you "don't have to" do in a 4X. They'll just cripple you for half of the game.
Perhaps you should time your libraries so you finish them before you get Theology.
>Pale shadow of actual tech trading and yet another nerf to waging war.
You use war to deal with noncompliant civs, not just because you felt like it. If you have a research agreement, you're using them.
And tech trading just shouldn't be in the game.
>Death carpets suck because they turn wars into traffic jam stalemates.
Sounds like you can't manage unit movement. Perhaps you should invest in roads.
>V has to cripple city production to mitigate this until late game.
It doesn't "cripple city production". It gives defenders a fighting chance.
>IV's civs also play to win and it's not like V's AI isn't dogshit at waging war.
War isn't the only victory condition, and from the sounds of it, the Civ 4 AI can't coordinate.

>It's a commitment for the rest of the game all the same. You could be indecisive and pick whatever suits you at the time, but why would you when most bonuses at the end of the tree are really strong?
Because they only might be, and that depends on you playing into them. Getting both the Piety opener and Aesthetics' cheaper Opera Houses and Museums is a huge boon for production.
>I'm talking about the orange frowny face crippling your city growth empire-wide, red frowny face stopping you from building settlers and crippling your production and red angry face spawning barbarians all over. 10 is not that much when expanding or waging a war. These are idiotic immediate penalties preventing you from chewing on more than the game graciously allows you to. IV at least allows me to conquer what I want, then struggle with the economic slump.
If you're sitting at -10 unhappiness, either someone identified all of your luxury tiles and wanted you to suffer, or you're a massive tard who shouldn't be declaring wars in the first place.
>What, specialists?
No, civilian priorities. Food, production, gold, etc.
>Or maybe the game should have more than a single meta for not killing your science output.
I trust you're also obsessively settling observatory cities only, right?
>Why?
Scales too hard with player count, and only works because the AI is too stupid to use it against you.
>I'm sure they'll help when every single hex within 6 tiles of the frontline has a unit on it.
What "frontline"? You should be attacking everything, not just the part closest to your own civ.
>Yes it can. AI can dogpile on you when you're already at war, enemy civ's friends can declare war on you, a civ at war can bribe another civ to declare on you, and so on. It's much more nuanced that V's infinite denouncement spam after you conquer 2 cities.
The Civ 5 AI already does all of that.

>And for some of them, it's stupid not to commit all the way. Why would you ever not max out tradition for faith point great people if you already put some points in, for example?
Tradition, because you wanted early culture and maybe a boost for getting Great Library, but have an aversion to Liberty. Those two are the trees everyone maxes.
>Or if you go for patronage, why wouldn't you go further
Because the opener alone gives you an easy way to slow CS favor loss, and you don't need more than that for whatever you had in mind for the lategame. Maybe you intend to go into Commerce and want Philanthropism, but don't need the 20 free CS loyalty points because you only want to keep a few CS up.
>You're trying to play outside of very narrow boundaries mandated by the game?
You're at the point where a frickton of people are rebelling in your civ and your soldiers don't want to fight. You cannot complain here.
>So worked tiles? That's not something you pivot to at a whim
During the midgame, it's common for your workers to outpace city pop growth. Sometimes, you need to move off from food tiles to rush a building you just unlocked, or because you've achieved equilibrium and don't want to grow a particular city.
>No, I just want the game to not arbitrarily cripple my science output because I dared build a few more cities early on.
Then build libraries. The flip-side of this is someone not having extra cities growing while he waits for fricking Theology.
>IV has no such issues and their AIs will happily trade with one another if they're buddies, forcing you to turn them against one another if you want to keep up.
Which only works because the AI is dumb and malleable.
>Assuming you have a nice long border with no obstructions, and not e.g. a mountain range in the way.
You find a way around and build a fort in an off position to threaten them.
>but that with all their alleged "play to win" mentality they're still dogshit at actually fighting a war.
So are you.

>Liberty is specifically one of the trees that are not worth maxing, what the hell Golden age + one great person is almost nothing.
"One great person" means snatching a free wonder, and Representation is used for the decrease in future Social Policy culture costs. The golden age is just a nice bonus.
>It's an arbitrary restriction that IV didn't have because V is deathly afraid of the player settling too many cities to fast.
Yeah, because that's the difference between Civ 6 settler spam and actual city management.
>IV has all that, in addition to changing policies and drafting/whipping here and now. V is again too restrictive.
Those are momentum-shifting options. Civ 5 demands forethought.
>Except that player will still be fine and reach theology on <4 cities, while an expanding player will be stuck with high science costs because god forbid having a large civ pays off.
Perhaps you should expand in phases, instead of spamming settlers and praying your civ doesn't burn down the way it would IRL, or just stagnate and decline, as some large empires have.
>I'll take an AI you can interact and ally with over an inscrutable, unpredictable and sometimes insane one.
You can ally with the Civ 5 AI, and insanity is to be expected when dealing with people. Mastering interaction with irrational agents is just part of life.
>Doesn't solve the carpet of doom issue.
It does, because it opens up new fronts.
>no u
u2

>IV already solved ICS. V shipped with the worst ICS ever that was later hastily patched, crippling the game in the other direction.
You call it crippling. I call it trimming.

>Yes, how dare I govern my civilization, all decisions should be made 100 turns in advance and if I get an opening because one AI declared war on another it should be verboten to take advantage and pivot to a war economy.
Perhaps you should've prepared units so you could intervene/defend before it became an immediate priority, dipshit. Make your own openings.
>IV already does that with techs. Cottages, Sailing, Alphabet, Currency, Code of laws all open options to improve the economy and expand more. What it doesn't have is a moronic hardcap that stops me in my tracks, instead it just gradually cripples my research. I have a CHOICE. In V I don't.
Yeah. Deal. This keeps "moron strength" builds in check. If you want to expand more, get some luxuries.
>Cool, but in a videogame it's indistinguishable from playing a slot machine.
This slot machine doesn't change its answer every time you roll. You can influence the outcome somewhat, but sometimes you just need to pillage to set expectations, going forward.
>Now I have 2 fronts packed 3 units deep instead of one 6 units deep. What an improvement.
Now, if you go a bit farther with that, and actually make an army before it gets to that point, you might have a few potent units just one tile deep, scattered around their empire because you didn't wait until the last moment to start playing the game.

>Or the game could give me an option to rape my economy in exchange for getting what I want when I think it's worth it.
No.
>And putting resources into a large army "just in case" there's a chance to use it is something that never happens. In 4X nobody sinks resources into a thing that has a chance of randomly either benefitting or crippling you later, you either go all the way or not at all.
Because they savescum when this "All-or-Nothing" approach gets them reamed.
>Or I can play a 4X that doesn't railroad me to a single playstyle.
This one doesn't.
>Or I can play a 4X where I have tools to know if an ally is an actual ally. IV had actual espionage to do that, V has a joke of a spy system.
Civ 5 spies also do this.
>Scattered units don't take cities. If you're talking pillaging, then it's way more viable in IV anyway where cities don't have magical ranged defenses that kill your unit in 2 turns, pillaged improvements take more than 1 turn to rebuild, there's no ZoC and no ranged units to delete your raiders.
That means it's easier, not that it's better.

>Then your 4X is reskinned Cookie Clicker. Reacting to events and changing things to adapt is better than planning your execution way in advance then having no tools to not stick to it.
Prepare backup plans or miss out, buddy.

>It's literally the other way around. You either commit to guarantee success or you don't start. Your "have a big army just in case you might attack" actually invites savescumming if an opportunity never comes.
Why would I savescum myself from the industrial era to the classical age? Frick that.
>In terms of expansion, it does. No you can't build more than 4 cities, you already grabbed and traded all available resources. Wait 50 turns for those pagodas/circuses/money for mercantile civs to finish.
Yup. Balances it out nicely. Manage your city pops if you don't like it.
>No you can't continue this war, you have an orange angry face, wait for that courthouse or for money to rush it or for more pagodas.
You can continue the war. You'll just also run the risk of rebellion if you keep taking cities.
>Barely. You'll see production in maybe one city, and occasionally a useless "X wants to backstab Y" hint. Compared to IV's it's worthless.
Sure, but that's an improvement. You shouldn't be able to see into another player's mind. Having info about their units near their cities is enough.
>Of course it means it's better. What's the point of raiding when you can barely penetrate enemy cities' 2 tile radius and it can all be fixed in 3 turns, compared to IV city pillaging destroying tens of turns of development?
Because now you don't just pillage in a hit-and-run. You pillage to threaten civilians and worker units, ruining their happiness and city productivity.

>You're the one advocating savescumming by preparing contingency plans for opportunities that might as well never come.
I make those opportunities, myself.
>Or again, I could play a 4X that doesn't dictate my exact playstyle.
It doesn't. Pop spread is your choice, and if even that's not enough, the problem is you.
>Which is a false choice since going deep in the red will just kill you.
Perhaps you shouldn't try to take the city you can't afford, then.
>AGAIN, V's sorry excuse for a spy system is inadequate for that. You barely get any info compared to IV's spies, and I'm talking info on production and unit movements, not leader attitudes.
Why would they make spies that powerful? Anyway, that's what Armory-Scouts are for.

>Okay? You can't kill units in 1 turn in V, so any early harrassment is just thanks to AI idiocy. It takes one shit low tier unit protecting a worker and within city strike range to prevent any and all raiding.
...In that tile. If you're running around with a horseman and pillaging farms, disrupting city connections (hell, building a fort on enemy roads), or just looking for anything possible to attack, you'll have a much easier time than you imply.
>In cotrast to IV, where an early mid-tier unit stationed in the woods near an enemy city can massively cripple them.
Anon, making civilians unable to work their most productive tiles, either by pillaging, or by stationing a threatening unit nearby, is disruptive.

>Then by definition they're not opportunities.
They're opportunities because I can capitalize on them, even if I had a hand in making them.
>Yes it does. It could just as well add a hard cap on the number of cities I can have.
Then people would load up on luxuries, spread out all at once, and forget about luxuries for the rest of the game.
>Because it's fun, gives you agenct and is a serious investment in IV anyway?
Again, use the scout.
>Not for enemy interior with closed borders.
It is. 4-tile sight range from a hill near them.
>What "unable"? You won't station your unit closer than 3 tiles away from the city
It means their civilians cannot work the tiles adjacent to my units.
>have no answer to enemy ranged units, can't capture workers if not against morons
Just shoot back or use cav.
>can't do lasting damage because fixing an improvement takes just a couple turns.
Opportunity cost is damage in a game like this.
>You're only finding success because you're harassing a moronic AI.
And because I know what to target. That plantation 2/3 tiles away from the enemy? He now has to stand a military unit on it to have a worker repair it. I can shoot that. I can send a horseman at that. I can block off farms, mines, or whatever. He can't do a thing. If he has a large army, target his trade and undermine it.
This isn't just an AI thing.

>Or you could have a sensible soft cap like IV did. Why ruin what already works?
This works better.
>It only works because enemy AI doesn't build more than like 5 cities lmao. Still doesn't tell you enemy production anyway and kind of defeats the purpose of closed borders.
If your enemy has to maintain and position units (easily killed) to scope out your civ's units, it works around the limitation of closed borders.
And no, it doesn't matter how many cities they build. Unless they're all covering each other, which is a legitimate way to hide information, you should easily be able to make enough scouts for whatever you need.
>Quote me a source for this mechanic, I see nothing anywhere about zone of control denying tile yields.
Have you ever played the game? You know how, when barbarians are near one of your farms, you can't work the farm? That also applies to other players' units.
>You said yourself that in mid game there's more workers than tiles to improve.
Yeah, usually. The issue is that you can't work the tiles, and risking workers is a waste that doesn't solve your problem.
>And that's the extent of your "raiding", a couple exposed tiles at the boundary.
Anon, that's literally everything but the one tile under your city, and if they position an archer on the third tile out, it covers everything short of the city itself.

>No it doesn't. You just don't know better.
Forcing people to engage with fixed objectives on the map to continue expanding? It's better than a ramping maintenance cost, yes.
>You mean "units you can do absolutely nothing about in peacetime", which is a shit mechanic.
Declare a war then.
>Yes, this lines up with my memory of how V's AI was incapable of playing wide.
If you're just building cities in concentric rings around your capital, then I completely understand why Civ 5 has you ass-blasted.
>From two directions at most, which is maybe 25% of all tiles. Again, made moot by strategic city placement.
That's per archer. The only thing preventing me from doing this all over your base is your army. If your army sucks, your tiles aren't going to be worked. "Strategic" placement really won't fix this.
>You don't risk workers if you have a cheap unit that doesn't get one-shot to protect them, especially when it takes literally a single turn to repair the damage.
Between arriving and repairing, it takes 2-3 per tile. And that's both idle time and a dead unit you now can't upgrade.
You're taking losses to repair a tile instead of just chasing out the army that has your capital starving.

>You said you never played IV. How would you even know?
That's it's better to have people compete over fixed objectives, rather than have them scale based only on their wealth? It's a matter of interactivity, and the basis for the above complaints of Civ 5 having a SimCity meta.
>You realize this sucks as a solution, right? You could've had IV's complex peacetime espionage rivarly, instead you have uncounterable peacetime scout spam where the "fix" is worse than the problem.
That exists, but it's centered on City-States and tech theft. If you just mean vision into a neighboring civ, I don't think that's worth having a full "rivalry" over.
>Right, you just brought up yet another absolutely moronic point about V: borders that don't act as your fricking borders unless you went tradition and are 300 or so turns in.
Get writers and amphitheaters if monuments aren't enough, or Choral Music.
>That's just a consqeuence of completely broken city and culture expansion that leave half the map unclaimed two thirds of the game in.
It bothers you, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
>Your opponent's army has to REALLY suck for this to work, which is not the case if you're not fighting a moron.
Or if you've defeated much of said army, and are now digging in to maintain the threat.
>Contrast it to IV, where you can make and send out a smaller army dedicated to raiding instead of sieging and if your opponent didn't build up a proper force to counter it they'll be pillaged to the ground.
Sounds like horsemen.
>Or I just retreat the cheap unit that survived and replace it with another one while your raider stays damaged.
Makes too many assumptions.
>And if you are chased off, you still didn't inflict any lasting damage beyond the time it took for your enemy to get his shit together and chase you off.
Caravans/Cargo ships, dropping luxury trade deals, killing enemy military, and idling pops while forcing you to invest in replacements? That's a lot of mileage.

>It can be global happiness for all I care, sure, but hardcapping kills gameplay diversity.
I think it gives happiness sources an appropriate urgency.
>Knowing how large the enemy army is and where it's headed? Absolutely.
You would need quite a few scouts for that, and once you grab Scientific Theory, you can't make more.
>What if I want my civilization's borders to act like fricking borders?
Play a different game. This one chose a practical border model.
>If you defeated the enemy army, then there's no longer point in raiding, making all your arguments so far moronic.
If you aren't dealing economic damage, your enemy isn't pressured to accept terms.
>Other than V's inherent city defense made for morons that garrisoned their cities in IV with warriors.
Should've been limited to the capital, sure.
>Except it pillages everything, and not an odd tile or two like in V.
That means it's balanced differently in IV.
>Internal trade routes are the OP ones
After Economics, sure.
>Trade deals are dropped in any civ, in IV it hurts more since you also kill off commerce from trade routes, especially if you block routes to other civs.
And we have road pillaging to cause significant damage to the enemy's finances.
>Killing enemy military is a zero-value proposition since yours is dying too.
Possibly.

>And zero ways outside of waiting N turns to satisfy this urgency.
Construction, starvation, CS investments/quests, trade, tile improvements, and extortion.
>Trade can only get you this far and anything else requires building up infrastructure. Exactly what I meant by being forced by the game to play within narrow parameters. It sucks. The game is holding your hand telling you how to play it right.
You have options. You just keep waiting until the problem is knocking on your door to address it.
>Which is ass-backwards if that's the case. IV has Physics unlock zeppelins, which gave you more vision as expected of new techs.
You have to switch to a horseman-line equivalent for mobile vision in that case.
>How the frick is it "practical" to have zero zone of control outside your city to the point enemy scouts can scout you anyway with closed borders and enemy army can just walk straight up at peacetime?
You have to maintain that threat for yourself. If the enemy wants to walk up with an army, get crossbows in forts on hills overlooking the city, and use your units to threaten tiles. Cover the approach.
>Culture is one thing, but even ancient empires could control their borders.
No, they really couldn't. They could only control common routes of entry, but civ doesn't have a logistics model, and most people wouldn't accept one.
>And if you defeated an army and V didn't have moronic superfortress cities, you'd do damage immediately.
Anon, what is a "siege"? The real issue is the fact that siege units only have two tiles of range here.
>All this time I thought we were talking about actual pillage-oriented wars, but no, you're just a moron who thinks nibbling tiles around enemy cities after killing an entire enemy army is "pillaging".
It's denial of resources. You can do it by pillaging improvements, by pillaging roads, by stationing units on your enemy's tiles, etc. Maybe you'll even raze cities. All up to you.

>If I want to expand right fricking now
There's your issue. You waited until the problem was at your door. Solve it before it gets to that point.

>Or do I declare first and suffer penalties instead of him? Great fricking deal.
That's an AI diplomacy issue.
>The real issue is that cities can fire back.
So says you.
>And if cities didn't have moronic defense buffs and 1UPT + ZoC wasn't a thing, you could have pillaging that doesn't start with killing the enemy army.
And you can. Just find an exposed road or trade route and have a blast.

>It's a problem right at the very start of the game, so technically you got that right. No matter what you do, it's literally impossible to expand quickly even if you wanted because you NEED to wait x turns to get happiness other than the few easy sources available from the start.
That's just a common sense balancing move. They didn't want aggressive land-grab (Mining-Workers-3pop Granary into eternal settler spam) openings like those, and even if they allowed them, you'd complain because you ran out of global happiness by the time you put down your third city.
Instant happiness would be a mistake. Plan ahead.
>Meaning it's the Civ V being shit issue. I know multiplayer has its own rules, but then you get into how IV's rock-paper scissors stacks are strictly superior to boring doom carpets.
Wouldn't be a doom carpet if you used workers outside your borders.
>If nibbling at a road here and there far away from enemy core is your definition of pillaging and "having a blast"
You're defending a position in the middle of the enemy civilization to hack away at his finances. He has every reason to drop much of what he's doing to fix that.
>You just don't know better because V is the first civ you played.
This conversation has revealed the fact that you have trash taste.

>If you ever played IV you'd know that you're full of shit.
Are you saying that's an opening in IV?
>Not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the boring unit-line-versus-unit-line of V versus actual unit composition and positioning in IV.
Are you talking about the same game as before? Anyway, the slowed movement, city-defenses and lack of stacking have only increased the importance of positioning.
It's not a simple matter of unit lines. You can brute force your way through, or invalidate army comps via rough terrain. You have to manage that with workers.
>IV has that in the early game. It also has rolling over the enemy civ with an army that pillages all the cottages and improvements and doesn't touch cities.
So, making multiple horsemen and rushing a neighboring enemy.
>Again, you don't have a frame of reference because V's "pillaging" is all you ever did.
And you assume the thing I described earlier is the only way to pillage.
>I played both IV and V. You didn't, pseud.
Knew you were going to play that. Your arguments are running head-first into each other and your own inability to plan is being shown, but inferring from everything you've said, you sincerely just have trash taste.

>I'm saying it's *not* a viable opening amd that IV already solved a problem that V tried to solve again for some reason.
Civ IV didn't do a good enough job. It tied the opening to wealth. Civ V instead wanted to use luxuries as the basis.
>No it didn't. It completely crushed any strategy. It's just a slog of focusing enemy units, rotating your wounded units back and hoping you have enough to bruteforce city capture.
That's only one way fights can go. You know there are positions people don't attack into, especially with flight techs on the table.
>Not nearly comparable. Just go play IV instead of making moronic comparisons you don't understand.
An army that quickly marauds, pillaging improvements without taking the city?
That's an early 3-horsemen.
>Of course I was, because it's a perfectly valid complaint.
Would be if you knew what you were talking about.
>You don't even understand what you're defending, it's the only thing you know. If you played a civ that's an actual 4X and not a puzzle to be solved in a specific way the game designer wants you to, you wouldn't be.
I've also played Oriental Empires, but that game has its own issues.

>You didn't play IV you dumb frick, how would you know if it's good or not?
Because it's wealth they tied it to. This goes back to my point earlier about set points on the maps being the objectives.
>Imagine having to wait until flight before combat gets good.
You shouldn't be declaring wars against nations with decent access to strategic resources without a plan to flood in anyway.
>Presumably gets shut down if the enemy has more than a couple units in his own civ
No. Horsemen can fight for themselves very convincingly, and even perform respectably against spears if, in one location, you have a decent mass. You can easily pillage your way through and be a menace without committing, and in the worst-case scenario, you just bring them home or send them away to heal. The horsemen remain useful for something, even if that fails.
>1UPT and ZoC stop any serious marauding, unlike IV.
Can. Chariot archers come earlier and provide a ranged arm to raids.

>inscrutable, unpredictable and sometimes insane one

That's how an human thinks in singleplayer games, a good AI would be an AI that will betray another player because it sees a potential path to victory, it doesn't matter if it seems chaotic, its thinking "like a human"

>is the superior 4x game in you're path

Since we are talking about bad AIs, that game has capable tactical AI but its pretty damn shite for everything else, it even needs to cheat on basic stuff like logistics

>If you need honor to deal with barbs you are like mentally challenged.
It's a matter of efficiency. Killing enemy Galleys on the water, clearing Barbarian camps near your base with minimal units, clearing camps for City-States half a map away, etc.
Your military unit positioning is important. Timely coordination for raids against neighboring civs is made or broken by the few extra turns you waste fighting Encampment spears with the knight you could spare.