Yeah odd time to be releasing staff. Then again it can depend which parts of the product are further from complete. Could be the sound engine and all the sounds were long ago created but other parts dragged and people related weren't needed or could be cut back, or AI, or graphics etc... Still they're fairly small making 20 people a rather large number and unlikely any one department/group I would guess.
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Civilization 5 Announced
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While I'm not likely to buy Civ5 anytime soon, here are my thoughts.
There seem to be three main changes to the game. First of all, diplomacy is supposed to be more mysterious than in previous Civ incarnations. Right now it sounds like a great idea. Originally removing diplomatic modifiers didn't sound good, but the more I think about it I'm not really such a fan of crunching number after number, and I'm glad diplomacy is going to be different. Second of all, combat is being improved, and I like this new change. It wouldn't be good if that was all, but it isn't. Third of all, culture victory is now different, as it is instead tied to unlocking a certain percent of the "Social Policies" tree, and this hasn't been talked about much (okay, the social policies are the main point, not the culture victory).
Civilization IV sure runs like a dream on my new computer.
Actually, the biggest changes in Civ5 appear to lie in city and empire management, which are making radical changes from every previous game in the series. No sliders at all. Most science apparently is supposed to come from specialists. Cities that expand borders one tile at a time. Happiness is going to be handled globally, not on an individual city basis.
Are these going to be good changes? Bad changes? I have no idea. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, you might want to take a few minutes to look at Arioch's preview website. It's a tremendous collection of information, and beautifully presented with screenshots. Great if you don't have time to read through two dozen gaming website previews. Worrisome: Quote:A city's local Culture production controls how quickly a city will add a new tile, and the population automatically chooses which tile to expand to, favoring whatever available resource the AI thinks your city needs. Trust the AI city governor to "know" which tiles to pick? Holy crap. ![[Image: eek.gif]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Smilies/eek.gif) I am officially worried about this particular mechanic.
That particular mechanic (or rather a variant) was tried for CIV iirc...it didn't last long because everyone hated it.
Sullla Wrote:Trust the AI city governor to "know" which tiles to pick? Holy crap. It won't be a problem as long as it's well-defined and predictable. It sounds like the Great Person lightbulb system in Civ 4. You might have to go a little out of your way on occasion to force the auto choices where you want them, but we'll learn how to manage. Also some of us might remember in Civ 3 manipulating city growth to auto-pick a particular tile, which worked okay once understood. No sliders... well that's a radical departure from Civ history, but certainly makes the game more accessible. Those sliders are one of the most confusing things for new players. Gold and tech are not all that intuitive as a tradeoff pair; in most strategy games, money goes to buy units and other material items. Sullla Wrote:Trust the AI city governor to "know" which tiles to pick? Holy crap. It'll be a problem if there's a random element or the algorithm is really complicated. Otherwise it's just another system you can plan around (and since you can spend gold to acquire tiles manually too, it seems quite reasonable). I don't mind a system that works well enough for most players, and for the players that really care, they can determine what's going to happen and act accordingly. T-hawk Wrote:No sliders... well that's a radical departure from Civ history, but certainly makes the game more accessible. Those sliders are one of the most confusing things for new players. They're also pretty dumb as a game mechanic, because they make gold and research too easily convertible to each other at a constant exchange rate, which effectively reduces the number of resources in the game for little benefit. Not to mention how in Civ IV, binary research was generally the best move. That was pretty silly.
It seems, IMO, that a lot of the Civ V changes are to make things feel right. For example, the hexes make unit move smoother, the tile-at-a-time culture growth seems more... is natural the right word? I mean, after all, in reality when a city expands, it doesn't expand in all directions suddenly and simultaneously, it expands one neighborhood at a time.
I don't know how these changes will affect gameplay, but they seem a lot more intuitive to me.
Played in: PBEM 4 [Formerly Jowy's Peter of Egypt] | PBEM 10 [Napoleon of the Dutch] | PBEM 11 [Shaka of France] | EitB XVI [Valledia of the Amurites] | PB7 [Darius of Rome] | Diplomacy 3 [Austria-Hungary] | PBEMm/o vs AutomatedTeller
SevenSpirits Wrote:They're also pretty dumb as a game mechanic, because they make gold and research too easily convertible to each other at a constant exchange rate, which effectively reduces the number of resources in the game for little benefit. Not to mention how in Civ IV, binary research was generally the best move. That was pretty silly. Binary research is always the best move... Krill Wrote:Binary research is always the best move... Yeah, I'm sure we agree. I said "generally" because I figured someone would argue about it otherwise in one of the following ways: - Some turns you do not want to do 0% or 100% research (to finish a tech one turn earlier) so if you define binary research as always choosing 0 or 100 then it's not always best. - Obscuring your true research rate from someone tracking your demographics is useful in multiplayer. - Not building up too much gold so that AIs can't demand or steal it could be good in single player. |
