Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[T-hawk]

Going by what Bob says, it sounds like Sirian really just wants completely unhindered ICS back.

Sirian wants the freedom to settle and exploit any reachable terrain at a positive value. This is not the same as ICS, cramming in cities at maximum density. But the game rules find it hard to distinguish between these situations. If the game mechanics make profitable settling a fringe tundra village with a few fishing tiles, they also make profitable settling a fringe half-city squeezed between your existing cities. Fishing villages make for good strategy in how to exploit what the map gives you; ICS makes for no strategy in ignoring the map. That's the difference.

[BRickAstley]

yeah, I bet you Ed Beach will have one those EUREKA moments when civ6 releases and fans pick it apart.

I've actually been thinking along the same lines that T-Hawk outlines above, in terms of games having a "natural path" and nowadays developers taking full advantage of it, so that the release is really only the first step in the life cycle of the game. Granted, I've been mostly thinking about this because of Stellaris, but I think especially with titles like Civ, which retain popularity over decades, this also works. It's probably fine for the balance to be absent somewhat lacking at release, the key factors are fun and robustness. Balance can be patched in as the community matures, and even having enthusiasts posting various videos of how this or that mechanic can be exploited in amusing ways actually serves to increase interest in the game.

At release novelty trumps strategic interest, albeit the latter still has to be present to a minimum level. As time goes on, getting the balance right is increasingly important, but actually it becomes easier to do with all the post-release feedback.

This is really interesting to have in mind from the standpoint of wanting to develop a game; my first instinct is definitely to strive for balance on opening, but considering how easily balance can be patched into games with the digital distribution model we have now, it really doesn't have to be your initial goal...

[v8mark]

This is really interesting to have in mind from the standpoint of wanting to develop a game; my first instinct is definitely to strive for balance on opening, but considering how easily balance can be patched into games with the digital distribution model we have now, it really doesn't have to be your initial goal...

Unless you have a fundamentally broken mechanic that you don't realise is broken, a la Civ5. 1upt essentially made the game nigh impossible to balance.

It's also worth mentioning that the development cycle of Civ4 emphasised balance at an early stage. That's one data point, but it's certainly an outlier in terms of quality. I don't know enough about how other historically relevant strategy games approached the issue to comment further, though.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

yeah, I bet you Ed Beach will have one those EUREKA moments when civ6 releases and fans pick it apart.

I've actually been thinking along the same lines that T-Hawk outlines above, in terms of games having a "natural path" and nowadays developers taking full advantage of it, so that the release is really only the first step in the life cycle of the game. Granted, I've been mostly thinking about this because of Stellaris, but I think especially with titles like Civ, which retain popularity over decades, this also works. It's probably fine for the balance to be absent somewhat lacking at release, the key factors are fun and robustness. Balance can be patched in as the community matures, and even having enthusiasts posting various videos of how this or that mechanic can be exploited in amusing ways actually serves to increase interest in the game.

At release novelty trumps strategic interest, albeit the latter still has to be present to a minimum level. As time goes on, getting the balance right is increasingly important, but actually it becomes easier to do with all the post-release feedback.

This is really interesting to have in mind from the standpoint of wanting to develop a game; my first instinct is definitely to strive for balance on opening, but considering how easily balance can be patched into games with the digital distribution model we have now, it really doesn't have to be your initial goal...

Definitely true. The most important thing now is timing the release right around a holiday or movie it seems. Bugs and balance can be done after. It's almost as if the pre order peeps are paying to do a Beta test!

[v8mark]

Definitely true. The most important thing now is timing the release right around a holiday or movie it seems. Bugs and balance can be done after. It's almost as if the pre order peeps are paying to do a Beta test!

This has always been the case though.

[HansLemurson]

large cities must constantly build stuff (a farm increases the pop housing by only 0.5) to house the evergrowing pop.

Specifically, now that workers have limited charges, to get a city to grow, you must be constantly building workers. Given that marginal returns to tiles fall off massively, especially given the districts and their adjacency bonuses, making vertical growth lucrative will be a challenge. Very interested in seeing what the number-of-cities cost/malus is.

yeah, I bet you Ed Beach will have one those EUREKA moments when civ6 releases and fans pick it apart.

most civ5 tiles receive marginal additions to yields when improved. probably that will persist in civ6, but now builders (workers) have 4 charges.

I don't have a problem with consumable workers. To me it actually seems like a clever way to implement Call to Power's "Public Works" system, while keeping it tied to the intuitive "units on the map do things to the map" mechanic that workers provide.

Frankly it always struck me as a bit odd how building things inside cities would cost Production, but building things outside of cities cost Worker-Turns.

[SevenSpirits]

Frankly it always struck me as a bit odd how building things inside cities would cost Production, but building things outside of cities cost Worker-Turns.

I mean, now that there's a direct conversion between production and worker turns it's even weirder. But I guess the reason for it is so that established cities can provide the production for the basic level of improvements in a new city.

[Sirian]

When you are rewarded not penalized for reaching for small gains, they can be some of the sweetest

This is a beautiful argument. But the problem is that this principle is isomorphic to a big micromanagement time sink. If the gains are available and positive, you must go for them and spend the required time, or you will fall behind someone who does.

This argument only applies to "single player competitions" or multiplayer. Yet who does huge-map multiplayer? So not even there. And how many Civ3 Epics or GOTMs ran on huge maps? One Epic, out of like 50+, and maybe two GOTMs? It's a valid argument but I think the subset of quiet, isolated huge map afficianados deserve consideration, too.

When you are rewarded not penalized for reaching for small gains, they can be some of the sweetest

This argument is also the core of where I found fun in Civ 5. I found that ambrosia in stacking up the religious and civic and GPP modifiers to enable those cities #5 through #8 to be positive value, even against all that conventional wisdom of Four-City Tradition.

This is the best sales pitch for Civ5 (to me, at least) that I've heard in years. Not sure it's enough to drop everything else and investigate, but in times when I had more time, I might have.

Civ4 begins with the lid on tight, loosens it, then ultimately takes it off.

Early game: found "too many" cities, get slapped down hard. Better stay within the allowed numbers.
Middle game: numbers loosen, you can found a few more cities if you wish.
Late game: OK, now you can do whatever you like.

I disagree. There are always tools to raise the lid in Civ 4 and keep up economically with as many cities as you can reach. I don't think you ever got deep enough into the later strategic developments of the community in Civ 4 to see this.

Perhaps apples and oranges. In none of my arguments am I operating from the perspective of where Civ ended up in the end, after expansions, all patches, and maximum community knowledge. This is a discussion about Civ6, and we are YEARS away from reaching Civ6's maximum maturation and saturation. Instead, we are soon to get a new vanilla version, tested to whatever extent was available internally, no expansions tacked on yet. And that was my experience with both Civ4 and Civ5, as well.

Deliberate partial-builds of wonders to fund a couple of extra cities might be doable in Civ4 -- I take your word for it. But that use of wonders wasn't intended and may qualify more as exploit than strategy. Neither Soren nor I played any major part in the design of the Civ4 expansion packs. I just did the events and the maps.

If either Civ4 or Civ5, now or at point in their patch history, supported huge map play it was entirely coincidental. This is different at its core than Civ2 and 3's support for it. And it is that deliberate support, intended to be there, that would draw my interest most keenly for Civ6. Time will tell.

Going by what Bob says, it sounds like Sirian really just wants completely unhindered ICS back.

Sirian wants the freedom to settle and exploit any reachable terrain at a positive value. This is not the same as ICS, cramming in cities at maximum density. But the game rules find it hard to distinguish between these situations. If the game mechanics make profitable settling a fringe tundra village with a few fishing tiles, they also make profitable settling a fringe half-city squeezed between your existing cities. Fishing villages make for good strategy in how to exploit what the map gives you; ICS makes for no strategy in ignoring the map. That's the difference.

Enforced minimum distance between cities is one of the best ICS counters that doesn't drag unlimited-number-of-cities down with it. It does kill off the half-size fishing village trying to make use of a couple of wasted tiles on the edge of a main city, but that is an acceptable loss.

It will be interesting to see what Civ6 tries in the ICS-blocking category. I was a key voice in both Civ4 and Civ5 on the topic of ICS, identifying when potential solutions would bring more harm than good. That's the true danger of ICS: trampling all over the core game in (an often vain) pursuit of stamping out the exploits.

ICS isn't even about having some half-cities tho. Those exist in real life: they are called small towns -- and there's really nothing wrong with them, in my view. ICS is when there are NO large towns, because every city on the map is a small town and they are crammed nose to nose, elbow to elbow. It's a Carpet of Doom of tiny cities -- originated in Civ2 when it was a winning move to plant a new city every 2 tiles, in all directions. ICS can still apply with cities 3 tiles apart or even 4, if the cities are crammed together as closely as the game rules allow, for the main purpose of trading city size for increased city count, but the term does NOT apply to high number of cities or adding in some weaker cities if core cities are allowed to grow fully tall and control all of their own tiles.

A lot of players who weren't there and don't know have, over the years, come up with their own definitions of "ICS" that are based on their own sensibilities rather than the history of the franchise. There's no debating with those folks (for me), in a sense, because they are misusing the term and talking about something else. We end up talking past one another. Perhaps some of that is happening here.

You are right about my core argument, though: freedom to settle the map that you have, so that you can enjoy a wider variety of experiences, rather than the designer regulating how many cities you have at which stages of a game: not even engaging the map at all, just kind of co-existing with it in a stand-off-ish sort of way.

The unrestricted method is a high conflict design: clashes will and do occur at borders, over who gets to control what territory. The restricted method is more of a "gentleman's agreement": you take x cities and I'll take x cities and everyone else will take x cities, and we'll all sit here and play patty-cake with one another for a while. Or maybe we'll fight, but without anything to gain from it, just fight for the sake of fighting just to be fighting: fight to wound the competition, rather than to gain for your own (imaginary) people. ... There's a certain smoothness to the gentlemen's agreement method, but it also comes with a certain kind of emptiness. You're battling the designer's leash around your neck rather than the opponents on the map. How this flavor took over the entire genre I am not sure. The unleashed flavor is one of the best things going for the new MoO.


- Sirian

[Bobchillingworth]

Pardon if I'm misunderstanding your intent here, but this:

The unrestricted method is a high conflict design: clashes will and do occur at borders, over who gets to control what territory. The restricted method is more of a "gentleman's agreement": you take x cities and I'll take x cities and everyone else will take x cities, and we'll all sit here and play patty-cake with one another for a while. Or maybe we'll fight, but without anything to gain from it, just fight for the sake of fighting just to be fighting: fight to wound the competition, rather than to gain for your own (imaginary) people. ... There's a certain smoothness to the gentlemen's agreement method, but it also comes with a certain kind of emptiness. You're battling the designer's leash around your neck rather than the opponents on the map.

Is an absurdly inaccurate view of Civ IV and, frankly Civ III. In "unrestricted" Civ III, conflict occurs because land fills up quickly (due to low expansion costs), units are cheap, and production-intensive city improvements are highly limited in number. Gains from conquest are often economically marginal due to corruption (pre-Communism), and all AI are liable to declare on the human without warning due to the game often compelling them to on the basis of an RNG roll. Therefore, fighting neighbors is often less about executing a coherent national strategy and more about "well, I have nothing much better to do with my production, and I'm going to have to kill these guys anyway, so I might as well fight now on my own terms", which is akin to 'fighting just to be fighting'.

In Civ IV conversely new conquests are immediately productive as soon as they come out of revolt into player control. Each captured city potentially adds significantly to an empire's productive capacity. There are far more resources to contest as well, which are much more rationally dispersed than in Civ III. In III it's quite possible to secure a copy of all the strategic and luxury resources available on one's landmass without fighting (or trading with) anyone, provided a player expands quickly enough. In IV, the map generator typically makes doing so impossible. This is to say nothing of fighting over holy cities, corporate headquarters, or IV's overall superior wonders.

It is also unclear to me why you insist on peddling this fiction that Civ IV has some sort of hard limit on expansion, as the community has demonstrated repeatedly to you that continual expansion through all eras is both possible and frequently optimal.


I prefer Civ III to IV in many areas, and have played the game on an at least semi-regular basis for almost 15 years now. I'm far better at it than I've ever been at IV or any of its various mods. That said, I take it for what it is- I enjoy the rapid pace of expansion, but it's also a semi-mindless activity akin to having laborer units gather resources in an RTS. I love the epic scale of Civ III's international warfare, but recognize that most conflict beyond close neighbors serves more to artificially keep players engaged than any strategic purpose. Who picks fights in Civ IV just to "wound" an opponent, human or AI?

[Gavagai]

Yet who does huge-map multiplayer?

We do. You may want to check out some of the later pitbosses. Most notably, PB18 and PB27 but, I think, PB13 and PB22 were also played on huge maps.