Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[spacetyrantxenu]

Don't send T-Hawk. Give the baby AI a fighting chance!

Fake edit: Almost missed that you specified MP instead of SP. That brings up a question here, since many of us play a pretty old game a lot of the time... who even has hardware capable of running a modern PC game? I think at this point I'd barely qualify. The last major PC upgrade I did was when Civ5 came out, so I'll be curious to see the system requirements when they're released.

[Bobchillingworth]

That brings up a question here, since many of us play a pretty old game a lot of the time... who even has hardware capable of running a modern PC game?

I imagine the answer is "most of us". About half the games I play with any frequency qualify as "classics", which I reckon is roughly typical for this community, but it's not like there haven't been plenty of modern games well worth playing.

[Bacchus]

Don't send T-Hawk. Give the baby AI a fighting chance!

Fake edit: Almost missed that you specified MP instead of SP. That brings up a question here, since many of us play a pretty old game a lot of the time... who even has hardware capable of running a modern PC game? I think at this point I'd barely qualify. The last major PC upgrade I did was when Civ5 came out, so I'll be curious to see the system requirements when they're released.

I think actually several people upgraded relatively recently, and had various posts on this forum regarding the matter

Offering ourselves up to Ed would be fun, all these hours playing and posting should amount to something, shouldn't they, please?

[T-hawk]

Civ 4's cash maintenance per city worked well. I see no reason not to bring it back for Civ 6.

Disagree. This had a lot of problems.

- It's obscure for new players. Look at any beginner Civ 4 forum and one of the first things they post is "How do I get more gold?" The really hidden part is how each city escalates the number-of-cities cost for all your previous cities - city #7 can cost like 20 gpt by this mechanic - and this is clearly communicated nowhere in-game and takes a lot of mathematical understanding.

- It didn't do what it said. It didn't really cost gold, it cost research. Because in Civ 4 gold and research were one and the same; conversion via deficit slider was very nearly one-right-move. Research is relevant but gold isn't. You can easily play either Civ 4 or 5 without ever spending gold because whatever you're converting it to is always inefficient.

- It didn't balance and scale right with the escalating yields and multipliers later in the game. It needed that clunky "Inflation" modifier and even that didn't really discourage more cities.

- It didn't balance and scale right with escalating player skill. It felt balanced in the early days, when everyone was wasting effort on religion and chariot rushes, before everyone figured out how to build for two food resources, cottage everything else, get by on paper-thin military and build via the whip. Advanced players figured out how to overpower the cost drain with Bureaucracy and Currency slingshots. We think this is good strategy because we figured out how to beat the system, but this is closer to one-right-path than we like to admit.

- If you screw it up, it's not obvious how to recover. The answer to "how do I fix being broke" is "have built cottages thirty turns ago". The answer is NOT what seems to be the obvious "build markets" because they don't do enough without those cottages providing the input in the first place to multiply. Civ 5's happiness cost both makes it obvious what you need to do - buy luxuries or city-states - and lets you fix it right away rather than waiting thirty turns.

None of this is fundamentally unsalvageable. Limiting expansion with an economic brake still can fundamentally work, but there's a lot of work to do besides just porting Civ 4's mechanism.

[SevenSpirits]

Good points T-Hawk, though I do think that while "build Markets" is not a solution, "build Courthouses" is both a (partial) solution and pretty straightforward.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I always thought that civ could have done with more add x gpt buildings rather than a percentage increase, like with EPs and on FFH.

[Dreylin]

Weren't Specialists intended to fill that niche?

[T-hawk]

Tile improvements fill that niche. If you want to add x gpt, build a cottage and work it.

The problem with additive buildings is the encouragement towards ICS. The more cities you build, the more copies of the additive buildings you can get. Anything additive per-city falls into this. Even Civ 4 did, with Great Lighthouse trade routes, Mercantilism specialists, religious shrines, the EP buildings, and of course corporations.

[GermanJoey]

I always thought that civ could have done with more add x gpt buildings rather than a percentage increase, like with EPs and on FFH.

To give an example about what T-Hawk is sayin, think about Mercantilism. You get your free specialist, so it's like having one free pop point per city, with some restrictions on how you can use it, right? Well, no. You have 1 pop point for the specialist, but then that guy is also "food free", meaning you get +2 food to feed him - or, in other words, two grass farms, which are two pretty decent tiles. Your civic or city maintenance upkeep also doesn't increase from these citizens, so that's like a half of a free merchant, and one more grass farm to feed him too. So mercantilism really gives you, with some strict restrictions on its use, 4.5 free pop per city! In RtR, which gives 2 free specialists, this would be like 9 free pop! Then add in Rep to double your pleasure! What's worse, this free pop is completely independent of the map - a size 1 iceball city will now have the output, after expenses, of a fair respectable, if mediocre, core filler.

That's where the real danger lies for a map-based strategy game. Once static bonuses stack up past a certain point, your game passes a conceptual barrier where what you do on the map essentially stops mattering, and thus decisions a player makes stops mattering. That is to say, once it is understood that static bonuses are more powerful than developing the map, the game just turns into a race to see who can get them first. On one side, that looks like ICS, and on the other, you get insane super cities. That was the big problem with Krill's SMEGMod, which had tons of awesome ideas that ended up getting drowned out because of static bonuses:




On the other hand, in very small doses, I think these sorts of static bonuses are fine, as a way to reward larger empires for taking the risks in becoming large (as well as being an incentive to get large to begin with). You just need to be careful with them. Like T-Hawk was sayin, base Civ4 is already pushing pretty close to (or in some cases, like the GLH, beyond) what is acceptable. (the other big one that T-Hawk didn't mention is the courthouse, which gives a huge static gold bonus plus increases your slider %, to give additional free beakers from any libraries, universities, academies, etc)

[GermanJoey]

Disagree. This had a lot of problems.

...

None of this is fundamentally unsalvageable. Limiting expansion with an economic brake still can fundamentally work, but there's a lot of work to do besides just porting Civ 4's mechanism.

I think these are really fair criticisms of Civ4's maintenance model. (even though I still think that, at least conceptually, Civ4's model is 100% the way to go) I think one of the biggest problem's with Civ4's model as-implemented is that they tried to create one system that worked across too many different game ranges. To start with, a barren world and one where you trip over grass gems will have very different economies. On top of that, one economic system is supposed to adapt to any combinations of:

1.) 3 different game speeds
2.) 8 different world sizes
3.) 9 different difficulty levels

That's 3*8*9 = 216 combinations per map! That's way too much for any designer to test out and make sure it "feels" right. And that's not including the fact that map dimensions will affect city maintenance, even for otherwise identical settings. The worst part is that there's no easy way to adjust the maintenance other than difficulty level, but then that affects barbs, so it's not too common to mess with that at least in MP games.