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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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Civilization V Solo Reports
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Serdoa Wrote:Maybe I understand you wrong, but Neuschwanstein is not from Gabriel Knight, it exists in the real world: Neuschwanstein is also the basis template for the Disney castle, maybe that's the reason.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Okay, one more.
http://www.dos486.com/civ4/civ5culture/ I also adjusted the text sizing and spacing on the site (it was too big and cramped), so it might make for slightly more pleasant reading now. T-hawk Wrote:Okay, one more. Good report as always. I really like how you expoilted that CS for free infulence and a worker. My only big issue is that are you aware that on level 1 you get insane bonues? I've read that SPs cost 67% less or so. It might have changed but if it is true I think it would not be possilbe to beat the 67% bonues and all the other crazy ones.
I will link to this interesting Civ5 read over at CivFanatics written by Islandia: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=471542
If anyone is claiming that the expansion fixed ICS as a problem in Civ5... uh, no. Not so much. 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.
I've always found it far more enjoyable to play a game that isn't in need of a slew of house rules in order to give a balanced and challenging game experience. I don't quite agree with the analogy between ICS and cheating, and I don't see how you'd voluntarily limit a concept as broad and fundamental as ICS. Spies can be regulated in this manner, but city building? You can do OCS, but chances are you will see that exclusively as a fun rare variant rather than a standard game experience.
I don't know all that much about Civ5 (or Civ4, for that matter), but I think regulating ICS through game mechanics is working well in Civ4. You need to develop your cities and acquire new tech in order to keep your expansion going, expansion by itself doesn't fuel further expansion all that well (unless you luck into GLH, which can be game breaking). I find that a lot more enjoyable than having to limit myself in order to get a balanced game experience. That's the situation I am in when playing Starcraft online. I like playing multiplayer squad missions (maps are called "Impossible XYZ", for example "Impossible Confluence" and "Impossible Crepuscular"), meaning you get a group of units rather than having to produce them yourself. Some of these units are game breaking. You need to clear the map of AI opponents, most of them passive until attacked. Battle Cruisers have Yamato cannons which can be activated to hit a distant target with a good amount of force, recharging for free after a while. With enough patience, you can simply yamato any threat on the map safely. Another example is Defensive Matrix, used by Science Vessels. They provide enough protection for any unit to carry out any attack unscathed unless you really mess up. If you patiently wait for matrix to reload before each maneuver, you run minimal risk throughout the game. I'm not having a lot of fun with those abilities unrestricted. A good solution would be to simply limit each of them by usage, such as max 3 yamato shots per mission. It would still serve a useful purpose but it wouldn't break the game and you would need to carefully assess when it has max utility. Implementing house rules for that is little fun, both when playing SP and moreso when playing MP. I've had some amount of success with talking players into doing 2p games (standard is 5p) with all of the overpowered abilities simply banned. Having to manually keep track of uses during the game would be even more of a joykill. That works, more or less. But my game experience would be vastly enhanced by having these mechanics balanced by themselves. For the same reason, my Civ experience is enhanced if I've provided with a balanced and challenging game experience as the game is designed, not having to invent it myself. Of course, there's nothing wrong with inventing challenges just for fun, but I dislike the necessity of having to do it due to shoddy game design.
Thanks for the good words, old friend.
 Sirian Wrote:But it is good to see that there is plenty there to strategize over for those who can enjoy the game as it is.There is, but there isn't. All the strategy in Civ 5 is on a very small level. All my work optimizing the path through the culture policies added up to maybe three turns difference on the ending date. All the work of picking the best city location means maybe one more citizen because the food cost is so brutal and maybe four more hammers because the tile yields are so homogenized and flat. My work on optimizing the payoff of research agreements was a small corner of the fact that buying maximum research agreements is always correct and dominates any other way to spend gold. There's no big-picture strategy aside from the single branch of win condition. Games of Civ 5 always develop the same way. There are no drastically different approaches like a Pyramids-Representation economy, or Great Lighthouse economy, or deeply beelined slingshots like Lib-Democracy, or crazy Great Person farms with twenty specialists, or Globe Theater drafting, or a workshop-powered State Property empire. Social policies appear to provide branching options (and fool the reviewers into thinking so after their single game), but really just serve to feed your chosen win condition. Culture always wants Piety, space always wants Rationalism, diplomacy always wants Patronage, military always wants Honor. The strategy is illusory. That single strategic point of win condition captured my attention for about six games, but now I have hardly any desire for more. The one thing left to do was Always War, and I started that, but lost interest after 100 turns since it was playing out just like every other game of Civ 5. I was trying to use the Aztec ability to catapult through some social trees, but the exponential cost of policies means you really can't ever get ahead. Always War itself is surprisingly uninteresting when conquest does you no good, thanks to the happy cap. There is strategy in Civ 5, but once you've seen it, you're done. It doesn't vary. I enjoyed solving it, but now it's solved. Quote:I've always been a Large Map lover, so it didn't hit the spot for me.I picked large for this map, for exactly the wrong reasons. Not at all for more cities and land and room. The large map provides more ruins freebies and more city-states and more AIs for gold-bilking and research agreements, all of which overshadow your own civ's development. Civ 5 strategy is dominated by exploiting external resources, not by developing your own civ.
I don't think I can agree with with the point that ICS is necessarily a problem: it is a strategy that is based off game mechanics that make per city boni too strong compared to the tile output. City overlap isn't something that is in itself "wrong", "bad" or "unwanted", when it is another choice that needs to be considered in the context of that individual game. Sometimes cramming cities together, in one part of the map, is a good idea. In others, even in the same game it might not be.
I suppose the point is that ICS is just one extreme in a single game mechanic, and when ICS is always the right more, it means the mechanic is broken and ought to be adjusted. I can't accept that a game developer can sit there and say "I can't balance this mechanic, so the player will have to play with house rules to balance it for me". That's just incompetence. |
