Sullla Wrote:If anyone is claiming that the expansion fixed ICS as a problem in Civ5... uh, no. Not so much.
An interesting report.
Security in general is a tough nut to crack. Trying to stop ANY undesired behavior -- in any forum, arena, or sphere of life, much less in games -- comes with serious costs. Security consumes resources which could have gone to some other purpose, so there's an opportunity cost to what else might have been achieved. Security can cost freedom, impose burdens, distort perceptions and experiences, impose all manner of side effects and unintended consequences, and often it fails to stop the problems it was aimed at resolving -- in part or even utter failure.
Some consequences are so bad, they are worth the security. Many other problems are worth solving in part, but more in the nature of deterrent than absolute protection. Some are better to be lived with.
ICS is one of those tough nuts. I'm not commenting on the above game at all, at this point, or anything to do with Civ5. Just waxing philosophical. When I was directing the Epics, I wrote up rules to try to bring security against certain moves. This was more in the nature of coming together to agree on what was simply not good for the tournament than it was about taking options away from people. Ultimately, this seems the best approach (to me) of resolving ICS. Don't try to do it in the game mechanics. Let players decide for themselves how much ICS is fun vs how much ruins their fun and let them choose their own limits. Any not intelligent enough to set limits on themselves can suffer their own lack of self-control.
Why? Well I'm reminded of a game I adored called Descent. When Descent got to version 3, it gave up on the old peer-to-peer local networking model and adopted the client-server model that had worked for Quake. Descent 3 was great fun to play (in my opinion) but less than a year in to the game's release, some players found a way to hack it. They could finesse certain things to fool the game in to letting them fly (move) faster than they were supposed to be allowed to go, giving the cheaters an unfair advantage. So the devs came up with security code that could stop this, but it came at the cost of downgrading everybody's experience. The game became more sluggish, more laggy, more mired down, and the difference was enough to actually ruin the game. Yes, the cheaters were a problem, but the cheating was easily detectable in game, because cheaters were never smart enough to give themselves only a tiny bit of advantage. Many of us played with known comrades most of the time anyway, and for any game with all known legit players, the added security was of NO benefit yet imposed a drastic cost. I actually quit the game over the security ruining all my fun. They should have given us a way to turn that off and let the game be as it was originally meant to be. Let ME decide if/when to use the security or not!
That became the end of that franchise -- although not solely for that reason.
I think ICS is that bad of a problem. I don't have any answers for it, personally, and I've spent years of my life analyzing Civ1, Civ2, Civ3, Civ4 and Civ5. There is no magic bullet, no miracle cream, no layer of security that will work without ruining the rest of the game in the process. If anyone thinks otherwise, they should find a way to produce their own low budget game and distribute it on Steam, because it will be a stepping stone to fame and fortune for them.
Master of Orion escaped the ICS problem because it supplies nodes instead of an open tileset where users get to choose the location and density of their settlements. That's the ultimate solution to ICS -- but it will never work for Civ. As long as you have the freedom to choose where to place your cities, you will have the potential to abuse that freedom as well.
I read T-Hawk's Greek Culture report and it's very impressive. I've never played any game of Civ5 with that kind of strategizing, yet I admit it is interesting to read. I know that strategy exists, and it's fun to see how someone else can play Civ5 the way I know how to play other Civ games. I say kudos and well done, on both the game result and the report.
I don't enjoy Civ5 very much -- for some very specific reasons that have to do with personal taste. Civ5 scaled down everything but the tech pace. You get fewer cities, with lower population, training less units, within less map space, than ever before. The reasons to push the game in that direction are logical, for a change to 1UPT. Without the ability to move whole SoDs around, the same number of units would require tons more micromanagement attention. This would have made for a slower game, slower than Civ has ever been before, and that would have been risky. So the evidence shows that Jon went the other way, making Civ5 a generally cozier game -- and I've always been a Large Map lover, so it didn't hit the spot for me. I've never played a game of Civ5 anything like what T-Hawk played and wouldn't know how if I tried. But it is good to see that there is plenty there to strategize over for those who can enjoy the game as it is.
The logical retort to this "too small" criticism is that I've played many Civ games on Tiny maps, and had a blast. That's true, I have. So in a sense it doesn't make any sense. I could go in to the same mindset I would engage on smaller map sizes -- but somehow, without the OPTION to "go large", I can't make it there. I get a mental block, it's not fun, and I stop.
I always had a strong micromanagement tolerance. I think I could enjoy a 1UPT empire game that took the other path, the path to even more MM than classic Civ. There's a certain critical mass of fun to the combat that is lost below a certain unit count. I liken it to Soren's "monkey wrench units" from Civ4, like the Axeman or Grenadier, that broke up the straight Rock Paper Scissors dynamic. RPS is just a little TOO simple to be engrossing, and for me, Civ5 on the whole kind of turned out that way. But that means suffering even more micro if the game design went the other way. Whether a game could do that and succeed is an open question.
- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.