Things to be wary of?

Apples and oranges my friend.  Apples and oranges.  How narcisistic do you have to be to fault a game by not transforming itself into what you want it to be?  Civilization wasn't supposed to have tactical combat.  You were supposed to use a chain of probability to your strategic advantage.  What you might consider "game ruining" is game making for others. 

You don't make any sense with that comment, did you just need to vent out a platitude?

Because isn't it obvious that the things I am referring to are the things that manifest only when you are already engrossed in the gameplay and can't be detected before and that specifically have a tendency to appear in these kind of games?

Reloading? So you lost a combat you thought to win, became angry and reloaded?

No problem for me, it worked both ways.

HOMM5 levelling could be annoying depending upon what you wanted and what you got. How about visiting witches huts in HOMM3? That was a pain, hiring a dupe to go see if the witch had a winner or a dud.

Whatever you don't like you could mod to be different. Why don't you say what you want  instead of saying what you don't want? You want a chess style combat where everything follows rules and there is no randomness? In that regard you don't like the Total War series either?

How is combat in Kings Bounty perfect? I've never played it.

Stardock deleted my first lengthy post by lagging me out, so I decided to post a short one then edit it and add on--- but you responded about 1 1/2 minutes after I had actually written the first part.  You are comparing games that are on opposite sides of the turn based genre.  I don't think Civ would have operated properly without an abbreviated combat system.  It's silly to call a game "ruined" just because it isn't the genre that you like the most. 

And besides, "random" is the meaningless pejorative of the hour.  No one ruins their credibility more than spouting off about evil, evil randomness...  And besides, your poster childs of perfection (Armored Princess and King's Bounty which, admittedly, are very good games) have pleeeenty of randomness.  When you send a soldier to attack another, you are given a "random" range of damage which they are capable of afflicting.

Look who's back.  I thought you weren't returning until May Hortz?

Now, now, people. He's actually making sense about the proliferation of TBRWITS, in his own Hortzy way...

OOOH this forum LOVES to eat posts!!      So annoying....Island Dog needs to connect an extra server instead of posting all day long (and playing PC games in their serverhall where Brad can't see him....)

Randomness is the spice that make something good exceptional. The random chance of which primary and secondary stat you get in Heroes V can put a pole in your spokes but that just means that you can't hope for things to go a certain path but have to be prepared to adjust. The A.I is useless at choosing secondary skills so you got an advantage either way.

Randomness may or may not be good, but it was ludicrous when macemen and longbowmen would destroy my stack of tanks in civ...

I've heard that before (I don't play Civ) and I wonder why they didn't just give tanks and planes an armor which make them nigh impervious to such primitive weapons. Kinda like the armorsystem in Dawn of War. Low damage Guardsmen against a Vehicle_Armor_Medium  was absolutely pathetic. Maybe 5% of the damage went through the armor. Against tougher armors the % goes down even more.

Huh?

TBRWITS stands for The Big Roulette Wheel In The Sky, a fairly derisive term for overpowered RNGs. Some randomness is fun, but the player also needs a certain amount of control in order to play with it: otherwise it just becomes a matter of "roll two dice and hope they both match".

Tired Of People Not Using Full Words

I remember stuff like this more from Civ I than from Civ IV.  I have a fond memory from Civ I where my Battleship was cruising along a coast and I spotted a Phalanx on a hill.  I attacked the Phalanx and my Battleship sunk.  You can still have some improbable victories in Civ IV, but nothing like earlier versions of Civ.  Civ IV is all about controlling when and where combat happens so the odds are in your favor.

Like so many innovations that are now common in daily life, this wretched habit was born in the military. Now we'are all part of the SNAFU, and it's just getting MFU on account of all the thumb-typing on tiny devices.

Plus, Scoutdog's been beating that dead horse so long that even he's probably getting tired of typing like a civilized person

Some random is good. Totaly random is bad. If everything is absolutley determintstic then i might as well go play fire eblem(good game, but not what i want from elemental). Don't want peasent miltia rolling dragons either. Having to take chances and risk your forces gives some good suspense though and really adds to the game.

Indeed. Civ4's combat/dmg "system" is a joke.

elite swordman killing modern armor? How is that a joke? Happens all the time in real life. Iraq invasion, quite a few tanks got killed with moltov cocktails. Set thier air intake on fire, engine gets no oxygen, it dies and rips itself up. Dead tank. For all that we talk about how high tech and powerful our army, all the gps and coordination gear and predator drone uplink won't save you from getting your face smashed in by a rock.

Have to agree with Cerevox on this one   I was not offended by Civ's battle system, even if longbowmen units killed tanks from time to time.  After all, the only time a longbowmen unit would succeed was if it was highly upgraded and that tank attacked the longbowman while it was on HIGHLY favorable terrain (across a river, up a hill, and into a forest.)  Is it so outrageous to assume that a tank would get mired in a river, stuck in a forest, and sniped from a hill, thus having their turrets and treads clogged by arrows, leaving it rust?  An arrow doesn't need to penetrate the armor of tank to defeat it.

Gotta have some randomness involed or you might as well be playing your game on a spreadsheet. I think the idea that randomness killed Civ IV is just silly. That's a wildly popular game for a strategy title. I've been playing Civ games since I knew what PC games were and they've done an excellent job with the series. No reason to hate on a game just because you don't care for a part of its system.

A guerrilla fighter with a bottle of gasoline and a match can lolpwn a tank by itself. The whole point of combined arms is so each kind of unit can cover for others. However, since civ4 is lacking in tactical combat, you get no combined arms. Makes sence for tanks to lose to infantry.

I hope that idea gets worked into elemental somehow. Statwise a knight might be 10X better then a peasent, but 10 peasents with ropes and clubs should be able to kill him. But if we stick some footmen with the knight and some archers to back them up and so forth and so on, they should be able to crush any equivlent cost/stat single type army.

Thats a real problem with games that use something from real life, we demand that they behave as they do in real life.

To the point that a good set of rules can't be included because people will complain when their battleship gets defeated by the phalanx.

Yes its annoying, but geez if you have a battleship and they the phalanx think what the AI must be thinking....

"Bloody human, always plays me on Chiefton level. Here we go again, battleship vs phalanx..... Hooray! my phalanx finally won! Oh no, you wouldn't, but you are.....  reloading....."

A toast to the AI! May it never have the ego of a human lest it realise what bad sports we truely can be!

Forum go BOOM double post.

I've played hundreds of games of Civ IV since it came out. What you are talking about is a very rare occurence. Like a fraction of 1%, so yeah rewriting the entire game for that miniscule issue... right. I am starting to question if some of you actually play Civ IV if you read that complaint some forum a couple of years ago and just repeat it.

Oh I should have mentioned the complaint that's been floating around since forever and is now on Wikipedia.

Lol @ arrows clogging tank treads or turret... that shit ain't happening.

I don't think it broke the game, but it was definitely annoying and immersion breaking whenever it happens. Even though it only happens rarely, whenever it does, it stands out as a big wtf moment. Modern armor is on a whole other plane from a longbowman; it just shouldn't be possible for the latter to survive except by running away.

I love to see an underdog victory, it's what makes things interesting imo. But I don't want it to be by chance, I want it to be because I planned a way to overcome the difficulty. Longbowmen, with ample knowledge of their surrounding terrain could easily survive long enough to take out the drivers when they get out to make camp. Effectively "destroying" the tank unit.