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[Asheron]

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.

[lumin]

I don't really know any mods that fix that issue.  I think if you go to civfanatics.com and use their modding forums you can find a few that "rebalance" the game.  I've never used them so I don't know what they do exactly.

In my opinion: Civ 2 > Civ 4 > Civ 1 > Civ 3

The only way I can enjoy Civ 4 is by using the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization mod that makes the game much more like a real Earth history simulation.

I just thought the game had too much bloat and even the quickest game mode took forever to get to the end.  I got sick of hearing Nemoy's voice and all the pretty graphics just slow the game down too much.

Civ 2 was just faster and more to the point, plus it was so much easier to mod.

[isitanos]

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.

I think that most of the things you mention are basically the core gameplay mechanics of Civilization. If they changed them, it wouldn't be the same game, and it might get too complex if they tried too hard to make it more realistic.

However I agree with you on the tech tree going too fast relative to turns. Maybe turns should represent a smaller unit of time. However if your military units are becoming very fast obsolete, it could be because you concentrate very much on military research - a more balanced research approach might help there, unless the other civs force you to keep up by upgrading their own military a lot.

As far as modability goes, I really don't know the extent of the possibilities - the game is supposed to be extremely moddable, though.

[Ubersoldat]

If only every game could be modded by editing a few text files...

Anyways, like Asheron just said, those are pretty much the core mechanics of the game. I doubt Civilization is meant to be a realistic simulation of actual civilizations, but rather an abstract empire-building game. Yeah, it's silly that it takes tens to hundreds of years to make a barracks or a knight, but I suppose you're supposed to think of them more as established military traditions or large military efforts...

Then your modern tank which took 10 years to make gets killed by a bunch of guys with sharpened sticks and completely craps on the above ideas. Ah well.

[Asheron]

Well, then I don't like the core mechanics... >_>

And uh, Ubersoldat, you probably mean "Anyways, like lumin just said...?"

Actually all off the five above reasons keep me from doing what I always dreamed about... creating MASSIVE WARS in the classical age!
=(

[Gantolandon]

Maybe turns should represent a smaller unit of time.

I didn't play this game since more than a year, but I'm sure it was customizable without any modding.

[Kagus]

The only Civ game I've got is Test of Time.  I never did get into it though, since I'm the kind of guy who prefers getting one city up to megacity status rather than running around and spamming the world with settlement after settlement.

I kept losing worlds to the AI...  And, I tend to have a hard time with games that have grossly out-of-proportion units/buildings.

[Aqizzar]

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.

Yes, letting the AI sides do things you can't has been a staple of Sid Meier games forever.  Occasionally the devs will mention when talking about an upcoming title that "this time" the AI has gotten good enough that it doesn't need to cheat to stay competative.  And they're always lying.

Which is now a bogus exceuse since GalCiv2 finally got it figured out.  I would really recommend GalCiv2 over Civ4 as much as it pains me, since for all my nostalgia, it really is just better.  Every complaint you listed applies to the entire series (including Alpha Centauri ironically, which was still good enough that I'd recommend it over GalCiv2).

[Tormy]

Civ4 is only good with the Fall from Heaven mod...and yes the Civ4 AI is cheating. 

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Civ 2 > Civ 4 > Civ 1 > Civ 3
QFT

Civ 3 was slower than Civ 2, gave you fewer options ... and OMG SO SLOW near the end turns would take half an hour each!

I liked how Civ2 gave you the option to do undersea and space settlements. But I wish there was a starting world option to turn those features off if you didn't want them in that game.

1) City Resources: The balance of resources is kind of clever and it keeps you from having a city with everything. On the other hand it sure would be nice to have an industrial, populous city that's supported by agrarian cities around it, like how real life has worked in large civilizations since forever.

2) Simultaneous Build: I think you should have buildings build units, and the city builds buildings. So if you want a warrior, you have to have your city build a barracks first. But then you can have the barracks start pumping out warriors while your city builds a harbor so you can start on canoes.

3) The AI always cheats. It's cheated since Mario Kart. Just the fact that the AI can conceivably do everything exactly precisely right means it cheats. And I've never played Civ above the middle difficulties just because it gets SO HARD after a certain point with harder difficulties. I'm convinced that by "difficulty" they really just mean "how hard the AI cheats".
They could solve this by assigning better start locations to you in easier difficulties, and make your opponents less aggressive, and making city populations happier. Take these away gradually and at the hardest setting you get angry populations in glacier cities and harshly offensive opponents. But they have to do all the same work you do to get their shit together.

4) Military: I don't like how it often degenerates into a rock-paper-scissors, even though you typically see a reaction in real life to create a defense specifically for use against a certain weapon, or vice versa.
As for the tank vs the warrior, you can think of HP as comprising morale, fatigue, hunger, etc. In this way, it's possible that a unit of warriors can tango with a unit of tanks and harrass their supply lines enough to weaken them for the next battle, represented by a sliver of HP lost. It makes sense to me anyway.
That said, my military strategy was just to pile fast units together into armies, build roads to the enemy road network, and just start capping cities. Coming in behind were scads of defensive troops and the conquered cities immediately start building defensive works which I rush-buy. Just about when my offensive military push starts hitting resistance, I enter diplomacy and go for a peace treaty.

5) Turns are way too long. Agreed. It's stupid to say it takes 20 years to get a unit from one city to the next via roads or crossing plains. I can see jungle and mountain exploration in an ancient society taking that long, especially since they might not have a good reason to work hard at doing it.
Also, it really takes 20 years to load a three units of ready settlers onto a ready galleon and then it takes 120 years to cross the ocean? Wow I had no idea. Good thing the crew of those ships is genetically diverse and includes plenty of women!

I have some of my own:

6) Diplomacy sucks. They accept only certain things in trade at certain times. Even if my military is assloads better than theirs they never give in to my demands, no matter how small. A little posturing turns them from friendly to open warfare. They're rarely willing to submit to peace terms unless they're losing horribly and are down to their last few cities. And they're never willing to trade cities ... they're not even willing to TAKE one of MY cities if I want to give it to them for free! They won't take back a city I captured from them!

7) Trade Routes: Civ 3 took out trade routes and Civ 4 left them out. Well, you can still trade goods, but you don't actually get a trade route that can be pirated on the world map.

Sabotage: Typically sabotage is a wash. Unless you're willing to save-scum a hundred times in a row you won't get what you want out of it. Instead they go to war with you because they found a guy with a strange accent in their city, whom they immediately killed and then questioned.

9) Future tech: Civ2 had hover laser capitol ships that were awesome weapons of mass devastation. Civ4 has ... battleships? Like the ones that can't come out of the ocean?

They had a winner with Civ2. Every civ since then has been a big faceplant into the ditch of pointlessness.

[Aqizzar]

The game you're talking about was Civilization: Call to Power (or maybe the  sequel, which I didn't play) - a knockoff (but maybe superior) game made by Activision to compete with Civ3.

This is Civilization 2 - a much earlier game that followed the same basic pattern the latter ones would, including limiting history/techs to known history.

[a1s]

Call to power was great, it was one of the few games I liked enough that I bought them even though I have Internet 
(It also need to be pointed out that the game came out 2 full years before civ 3)

[SolarShado]

I've never played any of the commercial civ games, so i can't say much about them. (Not a cheapskate, a teen on a $5/week allowance.) I have played freeciv (www.freeciv.org). It's got a bunch of options and plain-text ruleset files. I haven't tried making my own, but it doesn't look too complicated.

[kcwong]

1) Bad city sites result in bad cities... specialize your cities. Plenty of food? Make that a great person farm and rush your essential buildings. Plenty of hammers? Make that your unit factory and pump it large with more settlers. Lots of commerce? Concentrate of making more gold.

2) What LeoLeonardoIII said might work, and maybe they're also thinking of too many micromanagement if you can have too many things going on in every city of yours.

3) No way around it, until we can actually get programs to think and create new ideas. That's also the time when some evil AI executes its plan to kill us all. 

4) RNG is not actually evil, and your feeling is biased by some spectacular failure of yours or spectacular success of AIs.  There *must* always be some random factor in combat, or there's no point for the weaker side to fight.

5) There're options for faster research. Game length also affects it.


Also have you tried Fall from Heaven? It's the most popular mod of CIV, and it is very great. Civilizations are *very* different in there.

Fall from Heaven is made by Kael and his team. You'll need to Beyond the Sword expansion to play the latest version. If you don't have it, there's an older version too.

FFH Thread on CivFanatics

[a1s]

3) No way around it, until we can actually get programs to think and create new ideas. That's also the time when some evil AI executes its plan to kill us all. 

you seem to be forgetting that this is a game, with limited abilities and everything. As such you can be [partially] solved and you can make AI very successful just be using good strategies, because it can calculate what to do better than you can, if it knows how. This does take a PhD in maths, or, more probably, lots of play-testing and implementing that "by ear", none of which Firaxis ever does.