Civilization 5 Announced

[Dawn]

Trying to learn the new mechanics and while there are issues like the weedy AI moves and ability to declare war while standing beside the enemy city (although I think that was fixed), overall it's been an interesting set of first games (haven't finished one yet).
My playing level certainly isn't up to the Sullla, Kylearan, Krill and Sunrise level, I'm still doing better than I expected to at King. AI just can't seem to defend against my moves, but it can sure beat up another AI.
While the graphics and maps are pretty (nice job Sirian), even with the graphics turned way down on my laptop (last year's Dell E6500) it is slow. Switching to strategic mode causes it crash after 5 or 6 turns so no help there. My desktop at home runs it great, but it would be nice to fool around with the game at work and on the road.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Save version incompatibility is indeed alarming, and I hope is not intended.

If it's not intended, it is extremely amateurish. Not including a version number into the savegame (or not checking for it) is something I do not expect from an established game manufacturer.

If on the other hand this is intended, I will never buy a game from them again.

But for sheer complexity, is quite a challenging game. Indeed, chances are by the time they discover balance problems, those problems will have been fixed.

That the game suffers from balance problems that had already occured and been fixed in previous Civ games, like RoP rape for example, is not excusable, not even if they adopt a silly (and to me, insulting) "it's over Steam so we can release earlier and patch more" policy. And there are *a lot* of these issues in the game, things that they had to fix in previous version already.

-Kylearan

[Sirian]

Three observations about release timing.

1. World of Warcraft has an expansion coming out, surely before Christmas. WoW tends to suck up most of the oxygen in the room the last few years, so going straight up against it with the same release date could be a bad idea.

2. Corporate fiscal years (and government, too) tend to turn over in Aug or Sept. Executives could order a game be out on a certain day, presuming that one or two more months couldn't make that much difference in the product quality anyway, meanwhile making "last years" balance sheet look better.

3. Take-Two is a sizable publisher and could have other titles they want released nearer to Christmas, and/or not ready to go yet, and want to stagger these releases, so Civ5 gets its slot in the rotation and it's not a flexible release date.

I'm speculating about possible reasons, based on obnosis -- not privy to the actual reasons. But really, when you look at it from an objective point of view, all three of these reasons are reasonable. When a game has a two to three year development cycle, it's not crazy on the part of executives to expect it to be able to meet a deadline chosen well in advance. Such a deadline must come eventually, and what is wrong with an end of summer release date? It's close to the same time when Civ4 was released.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

Probably the biggest thing killing PC gaming is piracy. Pirating games on console is pretty tough, I would expect. One dishonest person almost anywhere in the production cycle could see a copy slipped in to the hands of Pirates before release day and the game cracked and available for free somewhere, before it even hits store shelves. Pirates infiltrating the game makers themselves made them more dangerous than in olden days.

Steam has a lot of support features that are positive in themselves, but one big thing it contributes is dramatic increase in protection against piracy (aka theft). The game box does not even have a functional game inside it: you have to download the key piece of the game off steam, without which it will not operate.

This kind of setup is less onerous on gamers (I think) than the old documents checks and other anti-piracy schemes of the distant past, as well as topping things like EA's limited number of installations and so on -- although this presumes the user has unlimited high speed internet. It may be problematic in Europe where telephone and internet are all run on hourly fees, with no unlimited usage in sight. And it may be problematic for any users still on slow connections (56k modems, etc).


- Sirian

[Soren Johnson]

2. Corporate fiscal years (and government, too) tend to turn over in Aug or Sept. Executives could order a game be out on a certain day, presuming that one or two more months couldn't make that much difference in the product quality anyway, meanwhile making "last years" balance sheet look better.

This is exactly what happened with Civ4. In fact, they moved the release date up two weeks earlier on us in August (turning six weeks left into 4 weeks) to hit a specific fiscal quarter, which was not a lot of fun for the dev team.

[Aretii]

I can understand the corporate line of things. It's my field of study, after all. And if indeed the home office gave them the autumnal equinox as a go date, then I can't really blame them for the balance or documentation issues. Not every developer is Blizzard, able to say with a straight face, "We'll release it when it's done," or to cancel a project altogether when it's not meeting their standards of quality (Warcraft Adventures and Starcraft Ghost), despite the fact their brand name means that any crap they release will make millions.

But Christ, couldn't they have at least told us about the save version incompatibility? Right now I have to bow out of a succession game I was genuinely excited about and wait an unspecified amount of time for a patch that may or may not be forthcoming to address this issue, and that just makes me feel really bad. I came out of the woodwork in this community for the succession games more than the Epics. Sure, Epics are cool and reading the reports back in the day is what got me lurking RB to begin with, but succession games are special. I learned how to play Civ, how to really play it, from succession games, from watching and reading Sirian and Sullla and Charis and LKendter and Arathorn and dozens of others play hundreds of games, discussing their moves in advance, explaining the moves they made, and analyzing the play ex post facto.

I bought the special edition for the soundtrack, more than anything, because I loved the Civ4 soundtrack CD in the special edition there and, what the hey, ten bucks, right? Plus a video and a bonus civilization, not bad. Only now, because I gave them extra money, I don't get to engage in the style of play that I was most looking forward to, playing with a community instead of just against or in parallel with them.

Ugh. I thought I'd be angry, but I'm mostly just incredibly disappointed in them.

[Speaker]

This is exactly what happened with Civ4. In fact, they moved the release date up two weeks earlier on us in August (turning six weeks left into 4 weeks) to hit a specific fiscal quarter, which was not a lot of fun for the dev team.

Is this the real Soren Johnson? If so, welcome to Realms Beyond, and what a random first post. If not, can we please change this account name to something that isn't "taken" already.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

disclaimer: I buy all my games and have stopped cracking since the mid 80's, when I had been young and didn't know what I was doing. I still know a lot about the technical side of piracy though, in parts because my daily work involves analysing malware, which uses the same techniques game companies use to protect their games.

Probably the biggest thing killing PC gaming is piracy.

So far I agree.

Pirating games on console is pretty tough, I would expect.

As far as I know, only the Playstation 3 did it right - their protection scheme seems to be a really tough nut. For all other consoles, piracy is easy, and copying and spreading games is done a lot, similar to what happens on the PC market.

One dishonest person almost anywhere in the production cycle could see a copy slipped in to the hands of Pirates before release day and the game cracked and available for free somewhere, before it even hits store shelves. Pirates infiltrating the game makers themselves made them more dangerous than in olden days.

Not sure what you mean by "olden days", but already in the '80s cracker groups had contacts in game manufacturers or at least had infiltrated the retail chain. Piracy is done a lot more professional these days, but releases are not earlier than in the past.

Steam has a lot of support features that are positive in themselves, but one big thing it contributes is dramatic increase in protection against piracy (aka theft). The game box does not even have a functional game inside it: you have to download the key piece of the game off steam, without which it will not operate.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. I know this is what game companies want to make you believe, but it's simply not true. Yes, you won't get the full game until activation day, that is correct. But that could be bypassed by infiltration of the game makers, as you have mentioned above. And once the game is released, Steam games get as easily cracked as traditionally boxed games. Once the game is activated, i.e. all potentially missing data has been downloaded from the server, a cracker can remove Steam and create a stand-alone, cracked version of the game and then spread it via filesharing or whatever means pirated games get spread nowadays.

Once all data is on your PC, Steam has to resort to using the same protection mechanisms as traditional copy protection schemes like SecuRom, VMProtect and the like. It uses Debugger detection, code obfuscation etc., but for an experienced cracker/reverse engineer, it can be bypassed easily. (In fact, once Steam is removed, the game is actually smaller and loads a lot faster.)

The only thing that makes pirating harder is some kind of server-side components you need to play the game, like for multiplayer. For single player, as long as all game elements reside on your computer, Steam won't stop or delay piracy in any way, period.

-Kylearan

[Soren Johnson]

Is this the real Soren Johnson? If so, welcome to Realms Beyond, and what a random first post. If not, can we please change this account name to something that isn't "taken" already.

yes, it's me... I prefer not to post usually (or ever, I guess), but I've done a lot of lurking on RBCiv over the years.

[Jowy]

Games like Civilization 5 encourage pirating.. Why pay 50 euros for an alpha version of the game? Might as well pirate it first, then perhaps buy it later once the patches are out and inevitably the price has dropped.