Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[SevenSpirits]

I do not know what he intended

Interestingly enough in you initial statement you sounded like you were pretty sure what I intended . My point is very simple - strategy game is a game about concentration of resources, hence you can't make a good strategy game if you forbid players to concentrate them. By contrast, tactical games are about positioning, in such games heavy limits on concentration are pretty much necessary.

Gavagai, I can't read minds. Admitting that doesn't mean I can't engage with what you wrote. You should have finished reading my sentence that you quoted.

I too am talking about strategic games.

[Lord Parkin]

Looks interesting. Slightly disappointed the trailer has no gameplay footage, though as I recall that's not unusual for Civ games. I'll look forward to seeing more in the coming months.

[MJW (ya that one)]

mjw on 1upt drama:

I think board games are different enough that using them for an argument for 1upt in Civ isn't helpful.

Having extra units should always be an advantage and unless the game is crippled there's enough uncertainty that you cannot just push through your opponent.

I think the 2x move bonus that the defender gets in Civ4 is much worse. The attacker really cannot deal with that and is forced to lauch a frontal assault to negate the defenders mobility and beeline to the city. Now you can snipe a city against a human but AI always keeps large numbers of units in defense so that doesn't work.

Civ5 got rid of the 2x move but MP died at launch, low-level SP doesn't matter because no matter what you do you win and high level SP forces you to get rid of the AI's carpet using indirects (the hard part) before you do anything.

[ipecac]

The way 1UPT was implemented in Civ5 was bad because it was too severe a restriction on the 'Build More' aspect that is quite central to how (combat-oriented) 4x games like Civ 4 have been played. It might be possible to work around this with smaller hexes but it doesn't look like Civ6 is going that route.

[Sirian]

I very much disagree with this analysis of the Total War games. Having the larger army in no way guarantees victory on the battlefield...

I said nothing -- not a thing -- about who had the larger army. What I did say was if the battles were close, in the form of taking heavy losses to earn wins.

Whether you have a third the troops the enemy or 3x their troops isn't relevant to my point. What is relevant is the LOSSES. If you are taking heavy losses frequently, you are playing "close" battles which are probably a lot more fun at the tactical level, but which are not serving your cause at the strategic level. If you aren't taking many losses, then there's nothing "close" about the battles, even if you are going in with (a lot) fewer soldiers than the enemy.

The two halves of the game -- in terms of their design -- are in polar opposition to one another when it comes to having fun. The more fun and interesting you make your game play at the one level (either one, take your pick) the less fun the other level becomes. To me, this is obvious; I realized it before finishing half the campaign in the original TW:Rome. I was saddened by the realization, because it shortened the life of the game for me. Yet divorcing the two is even worse, because I craved the added meaning of the tactical battles' outcomes being part of something greater. Skirmish mode just wasn't thrilling me either.

I had started out having lots of close battles, pushing my way through heavily-outnumbered fights -- got some markers put on the board for epic battle commemorations -- but it wasn't the best way to play the campaign at large. I put more care in to the strategy and the tactical outcomes became routs and grew boring.

I'd say that this is an inherent design challenge for the TW franchise or any other title that tries to have co-equal layers of strategy and tactics that are wholly separate. One of those sticky game-physics problems that is not going to be solved easily -- if ever.

Civ has sticky problems like that, too, and one of them is the greater topic at large here: 1UPT/CoD vs SoD.

MoO has the strategic/tactical divide, but the tactical layer is simplified and quickly over: up to six units, with nothing more sophisticated than a multiplying number on unit health and weaponry, representing more than one ship in a stack. There isn't the Total War style of attempt to make the tactical layer deep and rich. It's pretty simple and over quickly. Player spends much more time in the strategic layer than in the tactical.

I repeat my observation that Xcom (the original) did the best job of any game I've ever played at delivering a home run in both the strategic and tactical layers. Another one of those early 90s strategy games that spawned a whole genre (which has never since been able to duplicate (much less exceed!) the magic of the original.)


- Sirian

[Mr. Cairo]

I very much disagree with this analysis of the Total War games. Having the larger army in no way guarantees victory on the battlefield...

I said nothing -- not a thing -- about who had the larger army. What I did say was if the battles were close, in the form of taking heavy losses to earn wins.

Whether you have a third the troops the enemy or 3x their troops isn't relevant to my point. What is relevant is the LOSSES. If you are taking heavy losses frequently, you are playing "close" battles which are probably a lot more fun at the tactical level, but which are not serving your cause at the strategic level. If you aren't taking many losses, then there's nothing "close" about the battles, even if you are going in with (a lot) fewer soldiers than the enemy.

The two halves of the game -- in terms of their design -- are in polar opposition to one another when it comes to having fun. The more fun and interesting you make your game play at the one level (either one, take your pick) the less fun the other level becomes. To me, this is obvious; I realized it before finishing half the campaign in the original TW:Rome. I was saddened by the realization, because it shortened the life of the game for me. Yet divorcing the two is even worse, because I craved the added meaning of the tactical battles' outcomes being part of something greater. Skirmish mode just wasn't thrilling me either.

I had started out having lots of close battles, pushing my way through heavily-outnumbered fights -- got some markers put on the board for epic battle commemorations -- but it wasn't the best way to play the campaign at large. I put more care in to the strategy and the tactical outcomes became routs and grew boring.

Well, I can only say that you and I have had very different experiences playing Total War games. I have never found myself bored of the tactical battles because my strategic play was too good, nor did having fun, "close' battles ever ruin my chances on the strategic level. I'm sorry you didn't have the same experience. Having never played any of the XComs or MoO (original or reboot) I do not feel qualified to comment on either of those games.

[rho21]

I think the 2x move bonus that the defender gets in Civ4 is much worse. The attacker really cannot deal with that and is forced to lauch a frontal assault to negate the defenders mobility and beeline to the city.

It is a flaw of some strategy games that a strong force can run amok against a similar (or even stronger) force trying to defend multiple places. This is an inherent feature of warfare: the attacker concentrating their force at a point will be stronger than the defender, whose force must defend either a line (e.g. a land border), an area or a volume, depending on the nature of the war.

Some strategy games don't need to worry about this, because territory control (at least in the short term) isn't all that important. Others ban that level of concentration of force. Most allow it and have to aim to counteract the problem in some way, for which you need some form of advantage for the defender. Some possibilities:

• Defensive bonus for terrain
  
• Faster movement to allow quick concentration of force to counter an attacker's stack.
  
• A siege mechanic to slow the attacker's conquest and allow the defender time to concentrate.
  
• A supply mechanic so the attacking force must split itself or risk becoming cut off.
  
• An attrition or obsolescence mechanic so a concentrated force rapidly becomes weaker.
  
• A retreat mechanic to allow outnumbered defenders to refuse battle and fall back to concentrate with other defenders.
  

Civ IV has most of these to varying degrees.

Anyway, I'm not convinced that faster defensive movement leads initially to stacks of death. Rather the stack of death is a natural way to group your forces, faster defensive movement a way to counter this. However it seems likely that, of all of those possible advantages for the defender, faster movement is the one that most pushes the attacker to stick to a stack of death strategy, by making it less likely to be safe for the stack to be split.

I started writing this intending to argue against faster defensive movement being a bad thing, and I think perhaps I've reached the opposite conclusion.

[Zed-F]

What is relevant is the LOSSES. If you are taking heavy losses frequently, you are playing "close" battles which are probably a lot more fun at the tactical level, but which are not serving your cause at the strategic level. If you aren't taking many losses, then there's nothing "close" about the battles, even if you are going in with (a lot) fewer soldiers than the enemy.

The two halves of the game -- in terms of their design -- are in polar opposition to one another when it comes to having fun. The more fun and interesting you make your game play at the one level (either one, take your pick) the less fun the other level becomes.....

...I'd say that this is an inherent design challenge for the TW franchise or any other title that tries to have co-equal layers of strategy and tactics that are wholly separate. One of those sticky game-physics problems that is not going to be solved easily -- if ever.

For a split strategic/tactical game, I don't think this is a matter that one level's fun necessarily comes at the sacrifice of the other level's fun. Rather it's a problem of finding the right challenge level relative to your skill level. The game's difficulty curve needs to be very tuneable and a bad AI can really ruin the experience. But if you can tune the difficulty well enough to set up a game with an appropriate level of resistance to your efforts, then you can have your cake (interesting strategic level play) and eat it too (challenging tactical combat.) Tuning of game difficulty becomes increasingly important as the number of tools the player has available with which to outperform the AI increases; games with split strategy/tactics layers inherently have more such tools than single layer games.

If I find I am winning a game of e.g. Sword of the Stars easily and not taking significant casualties, then either I am in mop-up of an already-won game or I set the game up too easy in the first place, with incorrect difficulty tuning and/or insufficient variant restrictions. But if I did my job right then I will have dug myself a sufficient hole prior to starting the game that I will have a goodly sized period of struggling to catch up on the strategy level and intense, meaningful battles on the tactical level.

A good game with a split strategy/tactical map will allow the player to find that place where you are taking enough casualties for the battles to feel hard-fought, without either hemorrhaging units or winning in a walk, for some period before victory is inevitable. It is up to the player to actually find that place.

[v8mark]

The Long War mod for XCOM actually does this very well, by ramping up the difficulty more quickly and giving the aliens a higher end-game ceiling with the ridiculous boss units.

(Sirian, I don't know whether you've tried it, but it might be worth checking out if you want something more equivalent to 90s XCOM!)

[MJW (ya that one)]

Oh you want to talk about total war? In Shogun 2 your on the clock because there's no corruption system in that game (each city gives less money but unlike Civ3 it does not go to 1 shield, 1 gold) so if you take your time to get your perfect set-up the other guys taking risks are building a better snowball than you and will crush you. Everything matters when building a snowball. The strategy is how greedy you can get and the tactics allow you to be more greedy. And there's enough chaos in the game that a good start won't just give you the win. They just had to roid the AI enough so you have to do everything to win.

The other games the AI is bad enough that they would turn the game into a farce if they were to just roid the AI more.

Edit: Not worth its own post but I saw Age of Wonders mentioned. In 3 at least, you can snowball so hard that being able to kill something a turn or two faster is a big deal so it's not actually a good idea to follow the Powell there to.