[Semaphor]

It’s sadly missing what, for me, makes Civ V the best Civ: Vox Populi [0] fka. Community Patch fka. Communitas, a very extensive mod that under different leadership has been in development for almost as long as Civ V exists. It overhauls the whole game, fixes bugs, balances things, improves the AI (usual recommendation is to play 2 difficulties lower than vanilla to start) and adds features.

Recently they started doing community councils, introducing a process for proposals and getting them voted on.

Personally, as I don’t care that much about balance, I also play with the 3rd and 4th unique component [1] mod, which is mostly a one-man project and not as balanced, but makes civs even more distinct.

Oh, and of course, VP is open source [2].

edit: In case someone decides to play with it, the current version 4.x has had some extensive clean up and might have some new bugs. Also, many addon mods have not been updated for it, so you might want to use 3.x for now.

[0]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...

[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-unique-compone...

[2]: https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL

[senkora]

I appreciate hearing about the modding scene for Civ V. My experience was growing up with Civ IV and great mods like the Rhyes and Fall mods, and Fall from Heaven, and Planetfall.

I remember eagerly awaiting Civ V, buying it on release day, and then being shocked by how different it was. At the time I had strong opinions on all the things that it did "wrong", but now I've concluded that Civ is one of those games where the first one you play will just always be special. Objectively, lots of people love Civ V and I'm happy for that.

But even though I stopped playing Civ V I kept following along in the civfanatics forums to see what kinds of awesome mods would develop around it.

We never saw the same kind of total conversion mods that were possible in Civ IV, I think because of modding limitations. But I either missed or disregarded Vox Populi and now I'm excited to read into its history!

[Semaphor]

A difference is that it's absolutely not a total conversion. Afaik there are 2 or 3 of those, but VP is purely "Civ V, but better". Everything stays roughly the same, just fixed and expanded. It's a bit as if the devs never stopped working on the game.

FWIW, I started with Civ II (still have the thick manual), but prefer V ;)

[Rugos]

Shameless plug for my civ 5 total conversion mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=20591...

[29athrowaway]

On their release date, the best games in the franchise would be between Civ 3 and Civ 4.

Civ 5 and 6 are so different that it is difficult to call them successor games anymore. It's Civ meets Settlers of Catan or something, no longer a true Civ game.

The movement limitations in Civ 5 and 6 don't make sense. The biggest battles in history have been what Civ 5+ players dismiss as "death stacks".

Think of the Battle of Trafalgar, Battle of Stalingrad, Siege of Baghdad (1258), Fall of Tenochtitlan... all concentrations of multiple units on one area.

[Semaphor]

I mean, historical accuracy is not exactly a Civ feature. For that I’d recommend Paradox games. And game play wise, I find death stacks simply lame, so I’m happy they aren’t there. There are tons of things that don’t make sense for IV either, but I still don’t call it Uno.

[29athrowaway]

For Civ 4 at least, once you have cavalry, cannons, artillery, etc. There is a penalty for death stacks due to collateral damage.

[vintermann]

Civ is heavily rooted in a certain "classical" view of history, in which generals' tactical brilliance is what determines history.

So I understand why they wanted to make room for actual tactics.

If that comes at the cost of archers being able to shoot a bunch of gatling gunners across the English channel without them having the reach to shoot back, then so be it.

[toyg]

Gatlings are just a borked unit. A simple upgrade completely changing the unit-type raison d'etre is simply a Bad Idea, I honestly don't understand why they did it like that.

[29athrowaway]

And that still exists on Civ 3 and 4. There are different types of terrain, unit types, unit experiences and rank, etc.

No need to add the board game style limitations.

[personjerry]

Spent a lot of hours in Civ V and Civ VI, sadly the big Civ V mods don't work on Mac :(

[Semaphor]

IIRC this is because the SDK was only ever released for windows by Firaxis (and not at all for VI), and mods of this size would slow down far too much if they were pure LUA.