Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[Hail]

I'll give 5,000/1 on that this'll be patched that you have to invest your point immediately about five patches in, just like what was done with policies in 5.

5000 to 1 are marvelous odds. you are on. I bet $10.

My job was to help Soren make the Civ game of his dreams.

[troll]
Soren's Civ game of his dreams is a slavery whipping simulator? chop for spaceship parts? and yeah, everybody longs for Emancipation. all the women of Saudi Arabia dream all day about Emancipation and Feminism.
[/troll]

One of Civ5's secrets to success (with its new audience) may be that conquest is entirely superfluous.

disagree. one of civ5's secrets to success is it's abysmal combat AI. people like to win, especially, against all odds. civ5's AI provides just that. seriously, most will attribute an AI embarking a unit in front of the his units to the his ingeniuty, not AI's stupidity.

[Sirian]

Oh, and, by the way...

PC gaming on the net began in 1995 with Kali and Descent. I remember well enough. I was there. Warcraft 2 and Descent 2 soon followed. Multiplayer hunger and the ability to play against other skilled players at any time of the day, on demand (or as close to it as possible) is what drove development. CivNET was nowhere in sight. It was a good try, but it lacked foresight as to where net gaming was actually going. Blizzard was the first company to figure it out, as Battlenet for Diablo was the first successful company-based platform and is still going strong today. Today's typical method of in-game blind matching with opponents would have died on the vine in that era, as there was insufficient audience available to support it. Players had to gather in chat channels and match themselves. ... Civ2 did see forum communities emerge, though, and that is where the term ICS originates.

ICS's relevance begins when the developers took notice of it on the Civ2 forums and started *changing the game* to try to curb its abuses. Civ1 and its ability to settle directly adjacent to another city isn't relevant.

That wasn't the road to maximum scoring in Civ1, anyway. You first had to reduce the opposition (on the highest difficulty level) to a single 1-pop city. Then you had to build up a stockpile of food surplus in cities, have other overlapping cities that covered the same ground, swap the food from the main set to the backup set (gradually, only moving what the new set needed each turn) and use WLTKD to grow a new pop point each turn at the secondary cities, and time your spaceship to arrive right before the first set of cities exhausted their food stockpiles and began to starve. Yes, it was a crime against humanity to deliberately set up this feast-then-famine situation, where most of the planet would starve to death in a few years, but scoring twice off the same food source was rewarded with points. My best score was 432%, on a large cold wet map. What was your best?


- Sirian

[MJW (ya that one)]

MJW on ICS Drama:

They didn't know about it for one and two.
They tried to screw over ICS by capping the number of useful cities you have; you could work more tiles if you didn't ICS. Too bad the game was over when you could build hospitals. Due to the AI filling out the map ICS flat out allows you to make extra cities for free until then.
Civ4's city maintence system (with inflation) pushes out when ICS can be useful to when your cities are working all tile anyway. The right level to trout bash, GJ, about this is Immortal--not Noble! The first real difficulty level is Monarch, you have to tack on another for playing on lush maps and other for increase in player skill+tricks found. You cannot use the stuff in BtS because that was not part of the real design. So do you think you can city spam on Immortal in Vanilla Civ4?
Civ5's three tile rule cockblocks ICS. Wanting to have as many cities as possible is a different issue. In the full game happyness+research penalty stops that. The cure has bad side effects but it least it works. You cannot get extra cities by ICS because the map is big enough on its own.

Crack MJW theory:

I don't think there will be a corruption system in this game.

I think they inverted the foodbox. If you look at some gameplay a size 2 @ +6 food and a size 4 city @ +11.3 food cities's bar you will see the problem if you use a ruler. Pop growth is exponential! Keeping your pop in 1 city would allow you to build stuff faster, strong multipliers and you don't have to build buildings again.

The small science and culture penalties for Civ5 were meant for this game and they are there to stop you from making crappy iceball cites.

The tech tree is half as big as civ5's and tech boots make it even shorter. This is so the map doesn't fill up with cites.

They allow AI's to attack you at the start, without DoW, to stop settler spamming.

IGN article said that crappy boader city border won't affect your core.

Conquest might be overpowered by being able to take over cities of AI but they could just nuke everything when you take out a city.

Districts allows 1 city to spread out more so you can more titles to work with than a frontier one. It also allows you to build something powerful to counteract having more land.

Exploration theme fits in well with REX.

I'm 90% sure I'm wrong but if I'm right then

[Bobchillingworth]

I imagine you're right that there won't be corruption in Civ VI, I think that mechanic was close to universally loathed. You're totally wrong about allowing AI to attack players without any grace period upon initial contact- very few people would enjoy a game where an AI could stomp in their sandbox before they even have a chance to prepare themselves, even if enabling such behavior would Civ III-esque farmer's gambits. Plus an AI which is checking someone's expansion is an AI which probably isn't expanding itself- this is why the Civ III AI, which I'm not sure even obeys any sort of initial honeymoon peace rule, won't do more than skirmish for much of the ancient era. It's too busy trying to claims as much of the map as possible.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I imagine you're right that there won't be corruption in Civ VI, I think that mechanic was close to universally loathed. You're totally wrong about allowing AI to attack players without any grace period upon initial contact- very few people would enjoy a game where an AI could stomp in their sandbox before they even have a chance to prepare themselves, even if enabling such behavior would Civ III-esque farmer's gambits. Plus an AI which is checking someone's expansion is an AI which probably isn't expanding itself- this is why the Civ III AI, which I'm not sure even obeys any sort of initial honeymoon peace rule, won't do more than skirmish for much of the ancient era. It's too busy trying to claims as much of the map as possible.

Oh, when I say corruption I really mean stuff like it: ie city maintenance and happiness.

And I would guess would the AI would only attack if you do a Civ III-esque farmers gambit. They could disable it below Monarch.

[Bobchillingworth]

I think the best check to the farmer's gambit are barbarians, rather than AI faction aggression. Civ III implemented them poorly, but IV and possibly (?) V did a much better job, provided players actually enable them.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I don't know why people aren't freaking out aboutINVERTED FOODBOXESbut oh well.

I would also like to add that bigger cities could build housing faster and better than smaller one. Maybe Firaxis is trying to kill off just spamming cities by making bigger ones better rather than punishing you for making a small one but oh well.

[GermanJoey]

It requires waiting. That's the problem. You have to wait until the middle game.

No. 100% Wrong.

If you are extremely adept at exploiting every available cash-incresing lever, you can accelerate the arrival of the middle game, but it's still the middle game.

No. 100% Wrong.

The mechanism that is stopping you from determining when and where to settle is the heavy hand of the designer, not the emergent conditions of your individual game situation. You HAVE to follow the pattern laid out for you of unlocking this that and the other before you are allowed to settle as you please -- to settle what you are capable of defending.

No. 100% Wrong.

Civ4 only applies the heavy hand in the early game, lightens it over time, and turns it loose later. It's an INEVITABLE process, with experience and skill determining how quickly one can get to the loosening part. That's a skill set, surely, but some folks here seem determined to believe I'm incapable of managing the issue rather than deciding it just wasn't my cup of tea and walking away.

You deciding Civ4 wasn't your cup of tea isn't really a problem. Saying that you don't like things about Civ4 isn't a problem. It's that you continue to insist, over and over and over again, that the moon is made of green cheese despite us pelting you bloody with very real moon rocks.

And yes, at this point I am very certain that you just don't know how to play the game at anything beyond a beginner's level and have thus invented imaginary reasons as to why you were able to beat Civ3 on high difficulty levels but weren't able to master Civ4 in the same way. The problem isn't with the game, Sirian, it's with you.

Much of what's in CIv4 is there because of me -- especially matters related to game pacing and balance -- but that doesn't mean it's the Civ game of my dreams. My job was to help Soren make the Civ game of his dreams.

Now that is a goddamn laugh.

[GermanJoey]

Oh, and, by the way...

PC gaming on the net began in 1995 with Kali and Descent. I remember well enough. I was there. Warcraft 2 and Descent 2 soon followed. Multiplayer hunger and the ability to play against other skilled players at any time of the day, on demand (or as close to it as possible) is what drove development. CivNET was nowhere in sight. It was a good try, but it lacked foresight as to where net gaming was actually going. Blizzard was the first company to figure it out, as Battlenet for Diablo was the first successful company-based platform and is still going strong today. Today's typical method of in-game blind matching with opponents would have died on the vine in that era, as there was insufficient audience available to support it. Players had to gather in chat channels and match themselves. ... Civ2 did see forum communities emerge, though, and that is where the term ICS originates.

ICS's relevance begins when the developers took notice of it on the Civ2 forums and started *changing the game* to try to curb its abuses. Civ1 and its ability to settle directly adjacent to another city isn't relevant.

That wasn't the road to maximum scoring in Civ1, anyway. You first had to reduce the opposition (on the highest difficulty level) to a single 1-pop city. Then you had to build up a stockpile of food surplus in cities, have other overlapping cities that covered the same ground, swap the food from the main set to the backup set (gradually, only moving what the new set needed each turn) and use WLTKD to grow a new pop point each turn at the secondary cities, and time your spaceship to arrive right before the first set of cities exhausted their food stockpiles and began to starve. Yes, it was a crime against humanity to deliberately set up this feast-then-famine situation, where most of the planet would starve to death in a few years, but scoring twice off the same food source was rewarded with points. My best score was 432%, on a large cold wet map. What was your best?

That was sarcasm, Sirian. And, even if the specific term "ICS" wasn't around until Civ2 - and I have no idea about that, nor do I find it relevent - the strategy to spam as many cities as close together as possible was very well known for Civ1. First of all, the developers were certainly reacting to something when they added a rule to Civ2 that prevented one from placing cities adjacent to each other, and, second of all, you can read an archived usenet strategy arictle on civfanatics from 1994 (2 years before Civ2 came out) that describes the ICS strategy: http://civfanatics.com/civ1/faq/civfaq3.php

And I don't know where the whole multiplayer history lesson is coming from, but I too played on Kali. Far more than I remember Civ1 (and I certainly doubt I ever got as close to the score you posted, as I mostly remember playing weird variants after I had beaten the game a few times), I remember getting up at 5:30am every morning for a few months so that I could squeeze in a quick game of Warcraft 2 on Kali with my best friend before our bus picked us up, as that was one of the few times my dad wouldn't complain about the phone being tied up by the internet. Well, at least that was until one of his coworkers tried to call him one morning for a ride, and then complained bitterly to him about our phone being busy...

[Rowain]

Much of what's in CIv4 is there because of me -- especially matters related to game pacing and balance -- but that doesn't mean it's the Civ game of my dreams. My job was to help Soren make the Civ game of his dreams.

Now that is a goddamn laugh.

Are you really clueless who Sirian is?

That there is a Civ-community here on RB is also Sirians work. So perhaps you can stop your trolling and at least show some respect to someone who has done a lot for the civ-franchise and this Site in general.