Civilization 5 Announced

[Kylearan]

After Metroid: Other M's reception

Please stop spamming threads with off-topic references to other games.

[Sirian]

Ok, and honestly that makes me confident that as I learn the game more I won't have room to complain about the map scripts. But strategically, I don't think a developer of your talent was best utilized here. We have a discussion above in this thread about how rare a guy like Blake is, and judging from the finished product balance guys are just a rare/crucial.

Have you been to Gamestop lately? The PC gaming section is this tiny little thing in the back corner, where once it dominated the store. The market has moved to consoles, where the big boys are things like Playstation 3. With HDTVs now as good as monitors, and even the top consoles so much cheaper and simpler to deal with than a decked out gaming computer -- and a host of other reasons -- it is pretty rare for a title to be developed only for the PC these days. That's Civ5, though: it's a PC game, through and through.

There is a school of thought that says that balance is overrated. I'm not from this school, but it exists. Civ4 got a lot of emphasis on balance, but for Civ5 it's a different priority set. And from a business standpoint, there is logic to this. The game has to compete with all the other games out there, including the console market. It cannot sell only to veterans of the previous titles. There must be new customers attracted to the game and brought in if the franchise is to expand. This approach sacrifices the best interests of the hardcore fans for an effort to serve the needs of a wider audience set. Put another way, the emphasis is on being maximally friendly to and inviting to new players. And a lot of strides are in place in this direction: interface improvements, changes to some of the most complex or confusing elements of past Civ titles, and that sort of thing.

Civ4 was a one-man show: Soren designed and coded everything himself: all the game rules, AI code, everything. Civ5 has been put together by a much larger team with many more man-hours invested. Will the lean toward expanding the game's audience and keeping the franchise financially healthy in to the future pay off? We will have to wait and see. Will there be hardcore fans who decide to write the game off because it spent a lower percentage of its development resources looking after their specific needs? Undoubtedly so. Will the extra players attracted to the game by the efforts to open things make up for these losses? I don't know. I hope so.

But if you have a list of complaints about the game, I'm not the one to take them to. Not my job, not a task I'm interested in taking up. This is my Civ community still (not "I own it" but "I am home here") as well as my Diablo community, and I will be looking to relax and play both games here with friends old and new. That's all.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

This is the crux of it.

I wonder, why even risk it?

IMHO Stacks of Doom were not a problem worthy of risking the whole AI, and thus the SP game on.

Stacks of Doom were never meant to be. They are a hole in the game, arrived at by how the game rules ended up playing out in practice.

In Civ3, with unlimited movement on railroads, you could literally have a single stack defend your entire empire. This isn't strategic. Nor does Civ4's efforts to limit mobility resolve this major design flaw.

1UPT brings new challenges, but that is not reason enough to stick our heads in the sand and live with the mediocrity of the past. Underperforming AI can be evolved toward stronger performance. There is light, and hope, moving forward. Whereas the stack of doom is a dead end, capable of going nowhere: a played-out scenario. You may not be tired of it, but I sure was. Been there, done that, got the T shirt.

Civ3's difficulty levels were still in flux a year after release. They only settled down after a lot of fan feedback. Civ5's levels are in similarly untested waters. A few oversights on the balance front can distort the whole picture, too. A stronger game balance is needed, including more upgrades to the AI, and perhaps some tweaks to this or that element that may be leading to previously uncovered snowball effects. But these are the kinds of things that make PC gaming superior to the console, for a hardcore gamer: the consoles cannot patch; you must live with whatever flaws exist in the game at release. This leads to less ambitious designs, with fewer risks taken and less depth to the game.

And it's only the best players who are picking apart the high difficulty levels already. But I remember it being worse with Civ3 on release, with things like following AI settlers around and capturing their cities easily; whipping massive armies out of thin air vis poprush; and a host of other truly staggering flaws, all of which saw improvement. Civ5 is in much better shape than that, but there are bound to be some things that need patching.


A question for a Civ player, after trying a new version of the game (serious try, several games at least) is: "Can you go back?" For me in Civ4, the answer was no. Once I sank my teeth in to enhancements like overflows carrying over (no more MMing the exact number of production units or science units) and unit promotions, I could never go back to Civ3. Have I reached the same conclusion about Civ5 vs Civ4? Yes I have. I could never go back to stacks of doom. I could never go back to how the maps worked in Civ4. I could never go back to square tiles. Someone else may feel differently, and that's fine. Do I agree that Civ5 would benefit from more work? I do.


Why risk 1UPT? Why not? One cannot simply remake past versions. There must be effort to improve upon what is flawed in them, or the entire venture can only crash and burn.

Civ5 is bold in its reach. I expect that this will pay off in the end.


- Sirian

[ThERat]

Sirian, I remember us having a heated debate about Civ 4 and AW games.

Just to let you know, so far I am enjoying Civ 5 a lot playing AW (disabled city states too). It surely plays very different from Civ 3, but it is fun nevertheless.

(Maybe I am going to post a story of one of my games at CFC)

[Zed-F]

Why risk 1UPT? Why not? One cannot simply remake past versions. There must be effort to improve upon what is flawed in them, or the entire venture can only crash and burn.

I agree with this. Changing to hex-based movement and 1UPT may have been a risky move, but in the end you can't just keep making the same game over and over. I know many people who would argue that even with all the changes that have gone into Civ over the years, it's come closer to doing that than they would like. Making bold changes is ultimately healthy for the franchise.

Of course the caveat is that those changes should work well. It's unfortunate that for most companies in the PC game business, the mantra seems to be 'release buggy and patch later', but I'm sure there are business realities and imperatives behind that model's prevalence. Most companies do not have the resources to put as much polish into a game as they would like; it would seem Firaxis is in this boat.

For the discriminating gamer to whom polish is important, the only solution is patience. The direction of the changes I've read about in Civ 5 seem fairly promising to me, in terms of the potential for reducing micro, but I'm one of those customers who wants that polish to be there. I'm not super-invested in the Civ franchise and have enough other games available that I don't need to play Civ5 right now when it's not showing its best side; I can afford to be patient and see how things progress over the next few months. I hope and expect the game balance will substantially improve over that time.

[sooooo]

Does anybody know what those Honorable French are up to?

[Gyathaar]

And it's only the best players who are picking apart the high difficulty levels already. But I remember it being worse with Civ3 on release, with things like following AI settlers around and capturing their cities easily; whipping massive armies out of thin air vis poprush; and a host of other truly staggering flaws, all of which saw improvement. Civ5 is in much better shape than that, but there are bound to be some things that need patching.

Just to back that up..
look at : http://steamcommunity.com/stats/CivV/achievements/

so far it lists the achievements for winning at emperor, immortal and deity at 0%.. I dont know if it rounds numbers up or just down.. but its means that at best less than 1 per 1000 players has beat emperor difficulty (or less than 1 of 2000 players if it rounds up)..

the number for king is 0.2% (1 per 500 players)

[Gold Ergo Sum]

But these are the kinds of things that make PC gaming superior to the console, for a hardcore gamer: the consoles cannot patch; you must live with whatever flaws exist in the game at release. This leads to less ambitious designs, with fewer risks taken and less depth to the game.

This just isn't true anymore, and it is one of the reason PC games struggle. Microsoft recently released statistics that over 80% of its Xbox owners play online. And if you play online, you get access to patches, just like a PC gamer. I still get patches for my little rinky-dink Arcade titles years after release. And if you have an Xbox, every Xbox game will play on it. No worries about the specs of your system not meeting the requirements of a game.

If you want bleeding edge tech (Crysis), true RTS (Starcraft), MMO (WoW), or complex strategy games (Civ), you still have to go to a PC. But those are the only genres left that are the province of PC gamers. And given another five years, I'd be surprised if MMOs didn't make the leap to consoles full time as well.

[Amelia]

Sirian, your argument about how you can't go back to the old stack of dooms and square tiles bought me over. Nice argument, and I have to say i changed my mindset about it

[TheArchduke]

Well, I would suggest to put having too many city states as allies on the exploit list. Easy and simple for now.