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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1743 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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Just reminded of why I cannot play video games (at all). Whole weekend and part of this morning were taken up by civ, when I should have been doing other things.

Filthy addicts... :P

Was it a good campaign, at least? What civ did you play?

Maori on the classic Terra map. Got the whole continent to myself and got to play a nice relaxing dev game.

Sounds like Civ 6? I'm still on 5 (by choice). Skeptical towards 7 too.

Civ 3 was peak except for the stupid global warming mechanics. 4 was really good, especially with the live map editor. 5 and onwards have been sore disappointments for me, and the more I look at 7, the harder I gag.

Civ 3 really overpenalized playing "wide" instead of "tall". My father was a Civ fanatic but hated that one until I edited IIRC the corruption equation values.

Did you try Civ 5 with all the DLC? If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable, but other than that it became a great game.

If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable

That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win. I am sympathetic to the argument that doom stacks were better because the AI was more competent with them, but can't really understand preferring them as a game mechanic.

I did play plenty of 5, more of 6, before the dumbass AI in the latter threw me off for good.

You're correct to wonder if I dislike the single unit per tile limitation. I think it sucks, and makes warfare a matter of attrition (across dozens of turns), traffic control, micromanagement and heavy reliance on choke-points. I'd rather take doom-stacks any day of the week.

Back when I played 3, I didn't have any internet access, and didn't know how to mod it. If I were to revisit the game, I'd definitely look to do what you did, corruption was a pain.

It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.

I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.

If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.

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