Apology

[LKendter]

I think it's definitely CivIII burnout, as can be seen in all the CivIV SG's stuck in the same CivIII variants.

I am not surprised how stuck the SGs are on AW. This was the most intense form of Civ3 play. Civ4 has turned out to be a killer with AW. Now everyone is obsessing on trying to beat the new game with this style, and it is turning out to be brutal. I suspect you will be seeing Civ4 AW for a long time.

I am retrying one Civ3 variant with the limited city challenge. I am not impressed with the way it is playing out so far with Civ4. It seems to have brought back the constant fighting as the most effective method of play.

Constant war and expansion was the only effective model in Civ3. The other players that kept pushing me for earlier fighting were right. I kept fighting it, but in the end this is why I quit Civ3. I hated that model of play.

What is have realized is that part of Civ4 *success* is why I don't like it as much. The game doesn't hit the point of auto-victory (Civ3 had this with rail-net, infantry, decent empire size and not to bad of a tech deficit). I am finding it a chore to play late game turns now. Wrap-up mode is much later, if at all.


I am not surprised that Civ4 is having harder problems with SG play. There is no single magic formula to play now, and it makes team play a lot harder then Civ3.

I may have said this before, but the WW model in Civ4 is too much.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

I am not surprised that Civ4 is having harder problems with SG play. There is no single magic formula to play now, and it makes team play a lot harder then Civ3.

I don't think Civ 4 itself is making SG play harder. I think it's rather the lack of communication and not spelling out the details. I remember the first months of Civ 3 SG play: There had been lots of discussion about small things like how to improve what tiles, how and when to change city tile configuration, the math of certain city improvements like the granary etc. Now compare this to the first months of Civ 4, and I think you will find it's a lot different. There's still some great team communication going on, but it's less about the details and more about longer-term strategy. Maybe this is the case because a lot of us come from Civ 3 and still subconscously assume certain things to be the same.

Maybe it only looks like this to me because I was more of a newbie to Civ in general during the Civ 3 days and am a veteran now in the Civ 4 days. But quite often, I'm puzzled about the details when looking at the inherited turn in my SGs, why people had done something. While in Civ 3 SGs, these things had been spelled out in the reports (until later, when everybody knew about them).

Give the SG community some more time, and maybe some more discussion about the details, and I think the problem will resolve itself.

-Kylearan

[Sirian]

There is no single magic formula to play now, and it makes team play a lot harder then Civ3.

Civ3 took a while to find the single magic formula. I think the original Cuban Isolationists game had a big impact on this. Charis and I wrote a lot of detail, communicated about expansion plans, wonder strategies, and more. We wrote dotmaps, discussed the merits of our fishing villages and placement, and later, when the trading was occurring, we detailed the mechanics of almost every trade. That's where I coined the "@3rd, @4th, @5th" shorthand and spelled out the fundamentals of tech whoring.

Comparing Civ3's first six months to Civ4's, I don't see a lot of difference. There was disagreement about what to do in Civ3 in the early days, too. It is only comparing mature/expanded Civ3 to just-released Civ4, which is not even done patching yet, that a major mismatch occurs.

There is also a question of style and preference. A lot of the players who led the SG drive in the early going of Civ3 bowed out of the picture later. Just looking at RB people alone, Charis and I were gone. Sulla was gone. Sirp was gone. T-hawk and BamBam were active through Conquests but eventually faded away, too. The people who remained were content with replaying the game in its existing state. For some, it was the pressure of Always War and pushing the envelope farther and harder. For some, it was the lure of Sid level (man, I still despise the names of these difficulty levels -- I object to "Deity" most of all, but the implication that Sid is "more than a deity" is beyond nonsensical) and for others it became a quest for trying out variants or pushing the old variants to higher and harder situations.

That was a perfectionist realm: taking the known quantities and perfecting their execution to succeed in ever-tighter situations.

Civ4 has headed off in an entirely different direction. Yet I don't see it as any harder on teams, at the strategic level. What is harder is dealing with the mechanics of the game. Since you can't prebuild, and can't simply veto what you are handed in favor of your own plan, the CRACKS and WEAKNESSES in the old ways are highlighted. The game now requires actual teamwork, in that players cannot radically change strategic direction on a dime, rejecting all the plans of the previous player and substituting new ones. This isn't harder on teams: it simply REQUIRES teamwork, where the old game did not.

Yet what do players want? Do they REALLY want "the exact same thing, with new graphics"? I was sure they didn't. In a few cases, they might, but the number of people "going back to Civ3" seems to be very small.


Always War is going to attract attention. However, unless they stick to replaying Hub/Ring maps with favorable civs from here to eternity, it won't simply be a race to the "top".

I hope the next patch actually comes out this year. If so, we'll get the tournaments cranked up again, and then players will have an alternative to SG play. I would urge most of you to take advantage of that. Slow your SG pace, feast less, enjoy some tourney games.


- Sirian

[LKendter]

For some, it was the lure of Sid level (man, I still despise the names of these difficulty levels -- I object to "Deity" most of all, but the implication that Sid is "more than a deity" is beyond nonsensical) and for others it became a quest for trying out variants or pushing the old variants to higher and harder situations.

I never thought about the levels that way. That really is screwed up to say the least.

I hope the next patch actually comes out this year. If so, we'll get the tournaments cranked up again, and then players will have an alternative to SG play. I would urge most of you to take advantage of that. Slow your SG pace, feast less, enjoy some tourney games.

SG pace won't be a problem. I have dropped to a strict limit of just 3. SGs just aren't as fun as Civ3 SGs were at the moment. Maybe over time this will fix itself...

[marco]

I hope the next patch actually comes out this year. If so, we'll get the tournaments cranked up again, and then players will have an alternative to SG play. I would urge most of you to take advantage of that. Slow your SG pace, feast less, enjoy some tourney games.

i'm relatively new here and have been waiting for a new Adventure to be launched to start participating. i could go on and on about how wonderful i have found this website and the +ve spirit running through it and there will be a time and place for that, but in the meantime i wanted to ask whether we could really all be waiting until 2007 before a new Adventure is launched?

if that is the case and that wasn't a typo, in view of the time potentially involved perhaps you could set a deadline. e.g. "if a patch has not come out by such-and-such a date, then we will go ahead and launch the next Adventure with the latest version available at that date and wait until after completion to install the latest patch."

i don't think i will lose interest in the game or the website but i think the long delay could cause some other new members to head elsewhere.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

[...] i wanted to ask whether we could really all be waiting until 2007 before a new Adventure is launched?

Don't worry, as far as I know the patch is finished and "only" has to pass final QA, so we don't have to wait until 2007 for the Epics and Adventures to continue. I think Sirian used a bit of sarcasm when he said he hopes it will actually come out this year.

-Kylearan

[marco]

haha! put it down to a lack of familiarity with the senses of humour of different people on this site. it was the "if so..." that threw me off...

[pholkhero]

haha! put it down to a lack of familiarity with the senses of humour of different people on this site. it was the "if so..." that threw me off...

I thought the brits invented irony and understatemetn?

[LKendter]

Well I am down to 1 SG, and am stopping them for awhile. Any chance of starting an adventure since this patch is feeling like vaporware?

[Sirian]

Well I am down to 1 SG, and am stopping them for awhile. Any chance of starting an adventure since this patch is feeling like vaporware?

The patch isn't vaporware, but I can understand why it looks that way. "I come soon" is a promise that only lasts a short while. People get tired of waiting. Understandably so. We've never had a down time this long before. Not the most promising start to something I thought had enormous potential.

I clearly made the wrong call.

I'll put up a game tonight -- on my own webspace. "Adventure Five: Waiting For Gedot." Gris can give it an official home and support at her convenience.

Be back by 11PM EDT.


- Sirian