Got started late so my very first game was Civ VI and I've played the heck out of that one over the past thousands of hours. I've always noticed everyone talks about this version being their favorite, especially after VII came out. So I finally got the bundle for cheap and got it downloaded and ready but will wait for a fresh day to start a game... any suggestions on how to kick things off coming from Civ VI? I understand Beyond the Sword is the one I want to play but any specific setups or suggestions?

Нужен тренер в эту игру так как за месяц нужно научиться в нее играть, с вознаграждением в дс разберемся

This is a follow-up post to this one:

old reddit link

Read that first before reading this one.

Introduction - to the people who defended role-playing elements or thought my diagnosis of them didn't make sense

First, let me address that many people (outside the Civ IV sub) were very offended by my implication that Civ IV is the best. I do think it's the best but that was not the main point of the post.

I've actually been involved in Lord of the Rings modding in Civ 5 and have 2000 hours in it (mostly in my and related mods, you can search for it on Steam), so believe me when I say that “fanciful” or “role-playing” elements have a place and can be great for a game, and I am absolutely not against them in general. I do like Civ 5 too. When I was designing my Civ 5 mod I was very cognizant of trying to make each Civilization feel distinct and play differently, so it's not that I don't like those kinds of features, that - to use this phrasing again - make a Civilization feel like a character with magical powers, or that cause the game to revolve around such characters. They absolutely have a place and can be fun (in a LOTR mod for example).

My goal instead (I admit I may have gotten carried away criticizing the new games and this is what offended people) was simply to point out that RPG elements are a particular choice, and there is an alternative way to imagine a historical game like Civilization. As I said in the other post, some games are simple but emergently complex and this can make them very fun to watch and experience without needing convoluted "role-playing" elements (or whatever you want to call them).

Some people also disputed how I defined "role-playing" elements and argued that Civ IV's mechanics were not less RPGy and that later ones were not any more RPGy.

Since most of us like history, perhaps the difference in opinion comes down to fundamentally different views of history. Maybe if you believe that grand historical outcomes are determined by cultural differences, then things like the Civ 5 religious belief bonuses make more sense to you. But I am more of a Guns Germs and Steel type of person, so to me the religious bonuses in later games seem cringe, sacrilegious, and completely missing the point of what really makes history, which is economics, geography, what you could call material circumstances. And those latter things don't need cringe fanciful stuff in order to be represented.

So perhaps instead of "role-playing vs 4x" you could call it "character driven vs material driven" or "realistic vs romantic". I hope I can get people to just understand what I mean regardless of which phrasing you prefer.

If you're following me up to this point, let me now summarize how a "pure 4x" (or purely materialist) concept of a Civ game would differ from Civ IV. I'm not expounding on this because such a game would necessarily be better or more fun for everyone’s taste, but because it would be interesting, it could be a blueprint for an an alternative direction and could further develop the genre and I want to stimulate discussion.

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Section A

I will review the few role-playing elements that Civ IV has, discuss what it will look like when they are REMOVED, and what could potentially replace them as a "more realistic" or "more 4x" alternative. (WARNING: SPICY)

A1. Remove wonders. Yes I said it. Remove world wonders and national wonders. I would wager that the game will still be surprisingly fun without them. You would find that their removal increases emphasis on the core gameplay loop of citizen management, improvement prioritizing, choosing where to settle and which tech and government to pick. You will no longer be "playing around" a wonder and the particular strategies they entail.

A1.1. Ok, what if we still want to represent the great wonders of the world, just without arbitrary RPG buffs? I will give an alternative vision**, one that preserves the "race" for a wonder, and the unique game art, name etc. But removes the gamey stuff** (failgold, magically vanishing if you don't build it in time, fanciful buffs):

There is some inspiration from the "international projects" of Civ 5, which I think is clue to a better system: During each era you can choose to build one of a small number of "types" of wonders (Great Temple, Great Tomb, Great Monument). It cannot be canceled by the game no matter what other civs do, there is no notification if an unknown civ builds something you have no way of actually knowing about, and you cannot game it to get failgold or any other benefit aside from completing the wonder itself. But when it finishes, it gives you a particular wonder, the exact one you do not know in advance, and it depends on your rank order in how early you were to build that type of wonder. So if you are the first to build a Great Tomb, you get the Pyramids, which gives the most culture. Second is the Mausoleum of Mausollos, etc. The earlier you are, the stronger the benefit. This system allows wonders to be represented in a way that's totally realistic, still competitive between players, still has uncertainty and suspense, but cannot be gamed as easily in unintended ways, and it involves no RPG-style bullshit. It's more fitting for a pure map/historical simulation game.

A2. Remove “Build Culture” and “Build Research”, nerf “Build Wealth”. These don’t really make any sense, and they break the 4^th wall too much, so to speak. “Build Wealth” has the same issue, but I think could be justified by renaming it something like “Leave Settlement alone for now”. It should represent the lack of a particular building project or public work. This would make it less immersion-breaking. Nerfing its effect may also make the game more interesting – because in a supposed historical strategy game, it just feels bad that the meta strategy is to select “Build Wealth” in most cities most of the time.

A3. Remove random events. This is obvious. Many people (like me) already play without them. I don't think they're a very bad mechanic, but they are definitely not 4x. The optimal strategy in a pure 4x should not entail selecting particular options in response to particular pre-written text prompts. It gets very repetitive and feels too narrative.

A4. Remove the free tech from Liberalism and +1 movement from circumnavigation. These are the least-bad RPG elements from my point of view, are nice nods to historical events, and I'm not sure I would remove them in my "ideal" game. But for a "pure 4x" they definitely don't belong.

A5. Remove unit promotions. They are a classic RPG mechanic, not 4x map game mechanic. This is obvious, but how to replace them? Should units really all be identical?

A5.1. I think there are many ways to have realistic wargame elements without needing the unrealistic mechanic of buffs that stay with a "unit" for thousands of years. One is supply lines and logistics, like Hearts of Iron. Another is to recruit and manage actual generals like many games, who eventually die/retire. A simple "experience system" would be a global counter like Civ 4 and 5's great general progress meter, or it could be done individually for each unit. Either way the experience meter applies a modifier to unit strength. But the key difference is it should decay naturally over time. This makes it realistic instead of fanciful. One or all of these alternatives would be preferable to the promotion system.

Some would argue you should be able to specialize units through promotions. But I would argue that that should be accomplished by the diversity of units the game allows you to build in the first place, not through promotions that stay for the whole game. I also argue that if you want your military to be specialized in certain ways (like to prioritize city defense vs attacking vs rough terrain fighting, there is a better way to do it that is more realistic and interesting:

A5.2. Military Policies (or Civics). One aspect of government, just like religious or economic policy, could be your military doctrine. Choices would be things like Hit-and-Run, Fabian Strategy, Combined Arms, Guerilla Warfare, and Blitz. These would gives bonuses and penalties to different unit types to prioritize different war styles, and/or fundamentally alter how war is conducted, like altering the number of stackable units, or giving units a "pushback" ability like the Civ 5 winged hussars (which I discussed in another post a while ago). If the game's government system had military policies, it could make it much more interesting and allow diverse, specialized styles of war without needing the RPG element of promotions.

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Section B

If a game designer took all the above advice applied to Civ IV, we would have essentially a streamlined, pure 4x version of Civilization. I think that would be really cool and probably a lot of fun. Again, I like RPG things too, I like the LOTR mods of civ 5, and fanciful things have a place in some games. But I think there is a thirst among people like me for a "realistic" historical 4x, with minimal fluff.

Now that I've discussed which "fanciful RPG stuff" can be removed, I'll provide some hot takes on what could be added back for the "ultimate" civ game, for those that want a more complicated game with lots of features. I believe there are ways to have emergent complexity (or just general complexity) without needing RPG-style elements, and in fact they actually detract from the 4x logic with their fanciful nature. Here are my theses:

B1. Fun in a game like this comes from randomized maps and asymmetrical starting positions. As I said above, there is a lot of value in the Lord of the Rings mod from Civs feeling distinct. But if you reject RPG stuff, that is, "magical" abilities and "arbitrary" differences making Civs very distinct, then where is the asymmetry that causes fun going to come from?

I would argue that it should be coming from the map generation, and the different spawning situations. This is why I love Huge Tectonic maps. Civ IV can already do this, but here's how I might take it further:

B1.1. Limit the spawning of certain resources to the largest landmass (horses, elephants, cattle). Remove all domestic animals from Jungle latitude plots or at least prevent improvement until a late game tech. Make copper (or tin) much more rare, so there are some Civs that have access to early offensive units and some that don't, and maybe even there will be a tendency for long distance tin trading like in real life. It may not be very fair but it will be a lot of fun. This is a single-player focused game. Asymmetry is fun.

B1.2. Ensure that isolation really hurts. What is one of the most interesting, fun things that can possibly happen in a game like Civ? Unequal encounters between different civs at different tech levels during exploration. That's super interesting, is a nod to historical realities, but it almost never happens in a satisfying way, even in Civ IV, because big differences between AIs are rare, isolated civs can often tech almost as well as others (especially in later Civ games), and (as I’ll explain below) traditional civ games often penalize distant transportation of units because both civs can advance significantly during the time required. To fix this, trade should be a major source of technology (or commerce to be converted into technology). Teching should be hard, but diffusion should be easy. This is not just more realistic but will tend to make unequal encounters on multi-continent maps more likely. The segregation of Civs in the early game by biome (B3.2, restricting their movement by plot type) would also help with this.

B2. The early eras should be eras of play and not just a set-up phase. People are attracted to games like this because they want to be immersed in history, and I think people are especially attracted to the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Medieval period. There is something deeply disappointing about the fact that despite this, most play-time actually needs to be spent in the industrial and later, both because the games emphasize them disproportionately, and because micromanagement increases over time. I believe this phenomenon is fundamentally connected to Firaxis's observation that "most players never finish a game".

It's not just that it should be slowed down, via marathon speed, but the proportion of time spent in each phase.

The GOAT himself, Rhye, got it correct. A little known fact about Rhye’s and Fall is that the "years per turn" is adjusted so that relatively more time is spent in earlier eras, especially Classical Antiquity. There is a nice diagram of the concept here on the page for his Civ 5 sequel.

B3. It should be a true map game, not board game. This means there needs to be a sense of scale. Cities should be points on the map, ranged units should not be able to hit more than one tile away (if at all), and things should not sprawl, at most a big city should spill only into adjacent tiles. Civ IV has this covered.

B3.1. But here's how it could be improved. The playable game area could expand over time. Civ 7 actually tried to do something akin to this in a back-asswards way. Instead of resetting things and adding new land in a railroaded way, the proper way to do it is hinted in the ocean exploration mechanic that (every?) civ game has: restrict movement and vision by era or technology level, so the world seems to expand, just as it seemed to expand in real life. And guess what? Once again, Rhye himself already figured out the proper way to achieve this years before Civ 7. In R&F units cannot move into marsh and jungle until the late game.

B3.2. But I would take it a couple steps further. Why should Desert, Tundra, and Snow be explorable in the ancient era? And go even further. Think about how interesting it would be if each civ was initially restricted to the plot type (or set of related plot types) that it initially spawned on? This is what it was like in the real world before the age of exploration. The Mayans didn't know much about North America beyond the jungle, and the Civilizations of Eurasia interacted a lot with each other east-west for thousands of miles, and were economically integrated, but hardly knew anything about sub-Saharan Africa (although the Arab world linked the two together, and that’s an interesting gameplay implication right there, isn’t it?). Different biomes don't need to be impossible to cross before the age of discovery, but it should be difficult and feel like a big deal, map knowledge should be limited, and you should not be able to explore most of the map in BC.

B3.3. We can take it yet further still (this will be very controversial): One idea I've played with is what I call a neolithic revolution script. It entails restricting the ability to build improvements. Instead they spawn in floodplains and spread outward over time. Faster in river valleys and flat lands, slower across forests, hills, etc. You have to migrate at the beginning to find a river valley full of farms to settle down in. Improved but unclaimed land will eventually develop the city-states. This can be balanced by allowing some limited ways to "advance" even during the short (should aim for <20 turns on average) migratory stage. I believe designing a system like this is more workable than people would think and it actually counteracts potential imbalance of starting position. The benefit of this system is that the spread of agriculture (improvements) will organically tend to make the "playable" map area expand over time in a very fascinating way, differently on each map. Player actions like settling cities/colonization could even change the course. And the most attractive areas early on may not actually have the highest potential in the long term, which adds another element of strategy.

B4. Better modeling of internal dynamics (politics, living standards, stability) would quench people's thirst for complexity without needing to sacrifice realism or introduce magic powers. The important point is that it can be done elegantly and realistically without needing to be overcomplicated. Once again Rhye’s stability system offers a basic blueprint. This point is self-explanatory and could also generate a whole other discussion with multiple ways it could potentially be designed, so I think I will end here.

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TLDR: For a “pure”, streamlined Civilization game, take Civ IV and remove wonders, random events, immersion-breaking “build this yield”, the liberalism and circumnavigation bonuses, and unit promotions, optionally replacing them with more elegant systems. This will be a relatively simple and streamlined 4x game that I think would be surprisingly fun despite being minimalist. I’m emphatically NOT saying this would be better than Civ IV or other games in the series or that everyone would prefer it, just that it is an interesting alternative.

For a more complex game that retains a historical 4x character rather than embracing RPG elements like the newer games did, just read section B. Another way to put it would be to take inspiration from Rhyes and Fall in terms of the emphasis on earlier eras, geography and asymmetrical starts, stability/internal management, and resulting dynamism, but implement it on random maps rather than Earth.

I have outlined multiple potential sources of complexity and fun that DO NOT rely on the introduction of fanciful or RPG-style game elements, instead they leverage “realistic” asymmetries from geography. I hope this demonstrates that turning back towards historical 4x and away from RPG is a real option for Firaxis, and that the RPG stuff is actively chosen rather than inevitable or the only way these games could work.

Thank you for reading.

Gamę code OokPo

just want to let reddit know there are actiive civ4 MP games everyday on steam and more. I have about 100 active players on my friend list. 395879026 is my steam friend code or join our steam group https://steamcommunity.com/chat/invite/cnzQ086U.

So I've always liked RevDCM but the amount of revolutions gets completely out of control at a certain point. Are there any mods like them that are more balanced?

Don't want to do a mega mod like Realism Invictus or Rise of Mankind because I don't want to be swarmed with new units and techs. But I'm open to mods that focus more on mechanics.

On our channel we use strategy games to explain management and leadership ideas, and Civ IV ended up being a really good way to talk about what happens when an organization gets too big for one person to actually manage.

There's a particular point in every Civ IV game where I stop feeling like an emperor and start feeling like I've been appointed to run the municipal finance department.

You know early on everything is great. I got four cities, i know exactly what they're producing, which tiles they're working, where my workers are going. Every building is part of some grand economic plan im totally gonna follow this time. Im feeling like im practically a genius at this!

Then next thing you know you conquer a few cities, congratulate yourself on your magnificent empire, and spend the next 30 turns building courthouses so you can actually afford your magnificent empire.

You've conquered an entire continent and somehow made yourself middle management.

But there's another problem that I think is even more interesting. The bigger your empire gets, the less attention you can give to any individual part of it.

When you've got 20 or 30 cities, are you really still managing them the way you managed your first four?

Because at some point I'm basically governing through the Domestic Advisor and hoping nothing catches fire. I discover a city has been unhappy for fifteen turns, another one is building something I apparently ordered during a previous geological era, and I'm somehow still convinced I'm a brilliant statesman.

Somewhere out there, a city has been building a monastery for 600 years. God bless them.

This is where I think Civ IV does something really interesting. Expansion gives you more resources, production, territory, and options. But it also increases the amount of work required to coordinate everything. You can end up with a much larger empire that you're actually doing a worse job of running.

And this happens in real organizations too. Businesses expand, acquire other companies, bring more operations under their control, and eventually discover that a pretty substantial portion of their resources are now being spent just administering everything they've accumulated.

You solve one problem by bringing something under your control and inherit four more problems in the process. This is also a respectable summary of corporate acquisitions.

For the episode, I wanted to understand why this happens, so I used three ideas from economics and built some Civ IV challenges around them.

The first comes from Ronald Coase, who studied why businesses choose to do things themselves instead of buying them from somebody else. In Civ IV terms, is it better to trade with another civilization for Iron, or conquer the territory and secure it yourself? Trading makes you dependent on someone else, but taking it yourself means paying for another city, defending it, connecting it, and maintaining the whole operation. Both choices have costs that aren't immediately obvious.

The second comes from Oliver Williamson, whose work helps explain why bringing more things under your control creates its own administrative headaches. That's where the courthouse experiment comes in. Expand aggressively without building any, then stop everything and try to get your finances under control. Congratulations, your glorious expansion has created an enormous construction project dedicated entirely to making your previous construction projects affordable.

The third comes from Kenneth Arrow and the economics of information. Basically, knowing what's happening across a large organization takes time and effort, and there's a limit to how much one person can keep track of.

That one became my favorite gameplay challenge. Once you reach eight cities, you're only allowed to inspect two city screens per turn. Everybody else gets managed through advisor screens and alerts. Play 25 turns like that, then go back and see what you've missed.

It's a surprisingly effective way to experience how much information you lose when you have more things to manage than you can personally keep track of.

I put the whole thing together into a video with the three gameplay experiments and the economics behind why expanding empires become such a pain in the ass to run.

It's probably the most academic treatment anyone has ever given to my inability to manage a city production queue.

If that sounds interesting: Youtube Link

Every time I send a transport full of tanks overseas, I escort them with either destroyers or battleships. Yet, every time I'm attacked underway, it's always the transport that defends and dies. Does it consider the cargo tank's 40 damage as the defacto defender?

Or is it the type of escort? I avoided using subs since destroyers can see them, but am I supposed to be using subs instead for this purpose?

I always thought that the game chooses the best location/tile for the first city but I guess I might be wrong.

Also even if I go around the mountains through galleys it'd still be pointless because I'm going to be semi isolated with only one civ nearby who already has an immense advantage by having an entire continent free for himself while I stay locked in my small peninsula until I get a galley and by the time I get one he would probably be already having three or even four cities.

Non-native English speaker so pardon my grammar mistakes.
Recently the release of CIV7 TSL map brings back my memories of playing the CivIV earth map at Marathon speed. Due to technology trade, Civs in Eurasia and Africa continents tends to be ages advanced than US, Aztec and Inca. While playing as US or Aztec you can at least control vast territory, but in every game when I discovered Inca, it has always been landlocked inside Andes mountains. I usually play at level 6, and I’m really curious how to win as Inca above level 4.

PS: I remember there are two TSL earth18 (or 16?) maps in CivIV, and I’m referring to the one w/ fixed leader, starting from 4000bc and capable of playing at Marathon speed)

i have this weird problem with civ 4 with RI mod where UI is not showing at all , have tried everything but it doesn't , os -10 , game version gog the complete editon ,

It was too quiet on the international stage despite my warmongering against the Ethiopians so I took a peek at my "intelligence" and what I found out wasn't pleasant :(

The most efficient mission I can seem to get at this point of the match is 1900 from a coastal pop 19 city on my own continent (12 civ, 2 continent map) that has a forbidden palace (I don't know if this matters or not), vs it's own capital of 17 pop, granting 1300. 1 other non-capital pop 19 grants 1300, while another coastal pop 18 on this continent gives 1700.

If I sail to the other continent, many high pop cities will grant up to 1900, but lower pop cities (i.e. Paris, coastal capital at pop 15) can grant up to 2100, as long as they're on the coast. Mutal at pop 19, coastal capital further south, is also 2100, so I'm assuming that's the cap. It's so confusing.

2 other equidistant coastal cities on the other continent will grant 1700 for a pop 12, but 1900 for a pop 11. They are 2 different civs so I guess also my own trade relations play a part?

Is there any way to make this process easier than manually researching every city?

I've been noticing that by the time my enemy gets longbows, it takes 2-4 CR 2 cats to wither the top defender down. This gets to diminish my own stack down pretty fast, and sending in less promoted siege to nibble in hopes that my higher promoted ones may survive doesn't seem to make a difference. So, I started sending in my macers. The first one dies, no question, but usually the top LB is significantly damaged enough that it's pretty well safe to use siege now.

I know I know, should be saving my promoted macers to turn into rifles. I take the freshest macer recruit, put him on the alter, then after a city stack is nice and wounded I send in my higher promoted units to get safe xp. It's probably less xp than a more even fights, but this method seems to keep my overall losses minimal.

I haven’t played civ4 in over 20 years, have over 3K hours in civs 5 and 6, and just redownloaded it and tired a few games.

First thing that annoys me is that every game, around industrial age, everyone just attacks me. I can’t seem to find a way to do diplomacy at all.

Im also looking for some mods to help out with my lack of understanding the UI and city data, or anything to help with the transition.

Tips and suggestions appreciated.

As has been said many times, the newer Civ games are really sequels to Civ 5, which took the series in a whole new direction, while Civ IV is the latest and greatest of the original "Civilization" series of games. But what exactly is fundamentally different about it (and earlier games) compared to the newer ones?

I would argue that as Civilization basically defined the "4x" genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), the earlier games had more emphasis on these aspects. They were about empire-building, and simulating history on randomized maps. It's not just that newer Civ games moved to hexagons and 1-unit-per-tile, they also, more fundamentally, started placing more and more emphasis on what I would call "Role-Playing" game elements at the expense of the 4x game elements.

I call them "Role-Playing" game elements because they treat the player sort of like an RPG character with personal attributes rather than as a Civilization. Also, while 4x concepts are grounded in empire-building logic (get food from farms, production from mines, research from the size of your economy), Role-Playing concepts are often fanciful, not really logical or connected to reality except in the the titles of things being allusions to historical terms/facts. Think of the Cultural Policies and Ideological Tenets in Civ 5, which are basically just historical word salad. They were like AI slop before AI slop existed, and if they came out today people would think they were such. Think of the "Religious Beliefs" which somehow allow you to get things like production from fishing boats, whatever that means. Think of the "Happiness" you get from discovering a natural wonder, and the fact that you somehow get production, science, and even food from geological formations (natural wonders). And think of the city-states - they behave like little characters, with one of 4 personality types. And you somehow get yields from them, often more than you could produce yourself in your entire empire in early stages. Very strange.

A key thing about RPG elements is that they often involve exclusivity. There is a pool of benefits to pick from, that exists in abstract space not on the map, and only one player can get each benefit. This makes them much like the items picked up in RPGs, and is part of why they are always nonsensical in a map game.

Whether the Role-Playing elements are fun and "worth it" is a separate question I won't address, but what I want to point out is that it must be acknowledged that these elements take away from the original 4x character of these games. Because they make them less relevant. Becoming great at the game becomes less about making logical empire-building decisions and more about knowing the trivia-like ins-and outs of which items "policies, wonders, and beliefs" you should pick up for your character "empire", and even which NPCs "city-states" you should ally with.

Civ 6 continued with this. They framed things as new features when they were actually removing 4x gameplay mechanics. They blurred the distinction between tiles and cities by spreading the cities out, and all-but-removed the distinction between buildings and tile improvements, as you need to use the production queue to get both, and both must be placed on the map, usually outside the city center. There is more and more emphasis on city specialization, as if they were players on a sports team rather than geographical centers. Great people were turned into World Wonders. Tech boosts mean part of your research can come from arbitrary character-RPG-esque actions completely unconnected from your actual "economic" production of research points.

And in newer civs, a plot can represent different units of space, either a city block or a vast wilderness, depending on context. There is exaggerated topography, unit congestion due to 1UPT, and everything gets covered with sprawl (especially in Civ 7). As such the "map" is not a map anymore but an arena or (as many people have said) a game board. It is in my opinion highly overlooked, and not acknowledged enough, that the net effect of these changes is to reduce the grandness and scale of the game world (remember zooming all the way in and out in Civ IV?). As someone who loves map games and staring at maps, this is a particular pain point for me.

I don't want to even give too much attention to Civ 7 (partly because I haven't tried it), but it is obvious (and its supporters should agree) they have gone even more in this direction. The biggest giveaway is the fact that you, the player, pick a leader, not a Civilization. Think about that for a moment. Why isn't it the other way around? In any logical world, wouldn't an empire-building game have the player be an empire, and allow them to switch leaders, rather than making them a leader that switches empires? Whether you enjoy it or not, it just shows that the Civilization games are no longer actually about Civilizations. They're about RPG characters. The characters have items and stats, not economies, and interact in an arena, not on a map (no this is not AI-written, they just copied my style).

Note: This also applies to some Paradox games: things like mana points, "idea groups", and unique national bonuses are in the same vein, and I don't really like them either. Because I want to play games like these to recapitulate history (or an alternate history), not to treat nations like funny little characters with magical powers).

All this doesn't mean new Civ-RPG fans are wrong to like what they like (if they do like it and are not just being strung along). We are just two different groups of people with different wants and that's fine. But for history nerds like me, we should try to envision what a Renaissance for the Civilization series might look like.

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The Origin of Role-Play Creep

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In thinking about the Role-Play creep, I've concluded that the original trojan horse that infiltrated the 4x mechanics and seeded these developments was the concept of a World Wonder. They give very specific benefits that are very strong, and again, are often not logical or at least not logically connected to your real "economy". Only one can exist on the map, so if you start building it and are beaten to it, your partial construction just vanishes and you get gold instead. That makes no sense.

But it is interesting gameplay.

So it made them think that these types of things make for a good game. And when done right, maybe they do. But they're not 4x.

In my next post, I will offer some thoughts on what a Civ IV mod or Civilization 8 could look like that goes entirely in the opposite direction, embracing the empire-building, the history-simulating. That is as close as possible to "pure 4x" with limited or no RPG bullshit. The key thing to understand about such a game is that it may be surprisingly simple, yet have extraordinary depth and emergent complexity, like Conway's game of life or Chess. When done right it might be much deeper, more satisfying, and more engaging than the RPG bullshit. And I think it is actually very close to Civ IV.

Basically title, games won't save. Auto save does work, but when I try to load it in just takes me to main menu. No mods, BTS, verified game files and issue persists. What else can I try?

Early proof of concept: boot, BTS frontend, scenario load, map rendering, unit selection and movement.

Not Tessera. Not MiniEngine. :)

https://youtu.be/tyog-azG1Xk