First of all, this is
Civilization 4 . Yes, linking to wikipedia is cheap, but the meaning of this post is not to introduce people to it.
Now, first of all I would like to say that I like Civilization. See this more as nitpicking then bashing. So, here we go...
I always liked Civilization. Sometimes, you can just go build an empire and everything seems to go smoothly.
Most of the times,... well...
I have the feeling some things just aren't balanced well enough.
1) First of all, the ridicioulous low building speed for some cities. Naturally, well placed cities can make things a lot faster then other cities. The more "hammers" there are around your area, the faster you can build things.
However, food and hammers tend to conflict with eachother. Most of the times, it's hard to get a place with enough food to grow your city to a recent size and enough hammers to build things at a decent rate. Cities that you've placed in areas with a decent amount of hammers will require, even when at a decent size ( for the prehistoric age and classical age, that is ), anywhere from 10 to
60 turns to make normal buildings. Theatres, granaries, you name it. I am aware that building was a lot harder back then, but cities with population numbers that rise above the 100.000's don't need to
dedicate themself DIFFERENT CENTURIES at building something. As the time progresses, this becomes less worse, but it still tends to be somewhat awkward.
2) As I've said, cities have to dedicate themselves to one building or unit. Yes, for some reason, you cannot build things simultaniously. You can't even build a building and recruit a unit at the same time. This annoys me a LOT for some reason.
3) Those AI's are cheating. I'm sure of it. They manage to create a lot of cities AND a large military AND an economy to maintain it. When you wish to create a new city, you have to build a settler, which sucks up all surplus food, thus not allowing your city to grow. However, AI's at the beginning of the game have different cities with population sizes the same as those of cities who didn't build settlers.
EDIT: They still are mysteriously beatable, though.
4) The military part of the game is BAD. Although it works with a lot of modifiers so that waging war is "strategic", it still all comes down to the dice which determins a win or loss. The AI seems to have a distinct edge in these dice rolls, and can win victories where you can't.
5) Turns are way too long. With that, I mean the amount of years they represent. This leads to a number of problems, for example, research is scaled up with these "long turns", and you tend to go through the technology ages quickly. What is bad about this is that a lot of things become obselete WAY too fast. You just made a bunch of longbowmen? Nice, but you'll have to upgrade those in to grenadiers in twenty turns.
Really, the only way they will ever see battle is when you are very close to the enemy and you immediately declare war on them.
That's it, I think. Now, I know that Civilization 4 is pretty moddable, and I wonder if anyone knows mods that fix some of these problems above. However, I'm pretty sure most of these problems are pretty much unfixable.