Civilization vs Total War

[wumpus]

well, i've tried several civ games and their mods, and i've tried almost all tw--but i don't think an ordinary joe can try any number of the tw mods there are for him to say he has played most of them-- and there's a big difference. in tw, you build up your economy to buy some troops, and when you're ready to battle you'd have a fair chance of victory--the more warriors (of whatever kind) in relation to the enemy, the bigger is your propensity of winning in combat and at the same time you could suffer less casualties. in civ, you build up your economy to buy some troops and when you think you've enough and start to do battle--why the troops that you have fight one after the other and not all together as a team they slug it out in individual combat until one or the other "dies," then it's the turn of the next individual, etc., until either you or the enemy runs out of troops! in tw, you have a general or family member, you can develop him to be a tyrant or a benevolent ruler; in civ, you unrealistically shift government styles from monarchy to communism or fascism to democracy or whatever else (this won't happen to ANY kind of real-world people who have cultural sentiments, traditions, family ties, etc.) so, my point is--for me, there is no comparison between tw and civ, as there is nothing in common between fantasy and the real world.
but oh, of course, i DO play quite a number of civgames, and continue to do so--only i don't feel it's anything real, and i don't play civ for a substantial length of time. in fact, i feel the AGE OF EMPIRES games would be more realistic-feeling for me, than civ is (although, get me right, i don't consider AoE to be "very" realistic," only they're that closer to being realistic games than civ games are). and, by the way, i truly appreciate Sid Meier's talents at game-making, for example his very amusing PIRATES.
Hawooh.

[Maximus The Bruce]

I played the latest Civilization games, and they beat TW to a certain extant. I think stat tracking wise, it does. But overall, with the battles and such, Total War is so much better.

[Ariovistus Maximus]

Wow; I was wondering how many guys on the forum play civ. Neat to see there are so many.

Well, campaign mode RTW, MTW, or ETW probably can't compare to Civ. I know from experience RTW doesn't even come remotely close. Civ IV especially raised the bar with the diplomatic points system. In RTW, an alliance is like a "declare war on me in 5 turns" pact. Although, that might be intentional, because diplomacy in ancient times wasn't the most honest business either. The Gauls, for instance, revolted against Rome practically every year!

Another big thing about Civ IV is you can play a lot of different ways: diplomacy, economy, technology, or warfare. RTW only gives you the warfare. All economy and diplomacy is for the purpose of making warfare easier.

And Civ has a wide range of difficulty levels, which means you will almost always have a challenging game. My first win on CivIV on Noble level was the most exciting game ever.

Plus, of course, to have the range that civ does, you would have to have a TW game that could transition between RTW, MTW, ETW, and somehow incorporate modern times. Obviously impossible.

Civ IV also mostly corrected the spearman-killing-tanks problem. :D

But needless to say, TW battles (especially rtw eb or rtr) are excellent. In Civ IV sometimes warfare became pretty monotonous (sp?): spam macemen in your key cities, move said macemen to enemy capital, capture and repeat. And I never got really good at diversifying my playingstyle. After playing basically the same game 10 times, it got kinda blah. But that was because I didn't branch out into new methods of playing.

And like Aemilius said, they aren't really comparable. Civ IV can't have the depth that RTW does, because it depicts all of human history; conversely, Rome can't have the scope and strategic gameplay of Civ.

Anyways, that was a rather cumbersome dissertation about a couple of games, but there you have it.