When do we get a warlords epic?

[Kodii]

Really, I think its ultimately up to Griselda and/or Sirian. This isn't a democracy, its a dictatorship

Of course, someone COULD offer to sponsor a Warlords game.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Really, I think its ultimately up to Griselda and/or Sirian. This isn't a democracy, its a dictatorship

Nah, I would say it's more like a benevolent patronage, like the wealthy and influential supporters some lucky artists had some hundred years ago. Gris and Sirian support us and provide the means to play and report about beautiful games, but being completely absorbed in our art, we sometimes need a nudge into the right directions.

-Kylearan

[mostly_harmless]

The fact is that game developers are a business, they do not make games for charity. If you do not support them, then they will be unable to continue to develop the game.

This is a mixed up view I think. IF they were doing development for charity, then they must be supported to continue their work.
But as you said, its business. The guys are in this market to make money. So if the majority of the vanilla players is reluctant to buy the expansion pack so soon, because they feel they haven't explored the original version enough, the development/production team should learn the lesson for Civ5.
Lesson being, spend more time on bugfixing, rebalancing the vanilla version and hold back the expansion.

Clearly there is a lot of interest in Warlords in real life, so they might "get away" with it.

-mh

[theGrimm]

The only games of Civ4 I play are RB games. (Too many hobbies). I have no intention of buying warlords, but if the RB community follows that route, I will follow suit.

[Iustus]

Interesting view. Perhaps we are both right.

Let me give you another example. Lets say you see a really great independent movie which has a limited release. Or maybe you eat at this new restraunt that is in an out of the way place. You love the food there.

In either case, you love it, but you tell all your friends about it, to get them to go as well, because you want them to do a good business. In the case of the restraunt, if they do not do well, then they will close, and then you will not be able to eat there yourself.

Now, neither analogy is perfect. (You cannot get the perfect meal there once, take it home, and eat it over and over without paying them any more money, like you can with a game).

Back to reality, there comes a point with every game where sales drop to the point that they cannot pay for continued development support. If you want there to continue to be patches, then there must be an expansion, or the game will be declared dead. The only way to prevent this if you do not want to buy the expansion, is to go and buy extra copies of the vanilla game.

Perhaps I am wrong about this, but it is my impression that all future work on Civ4 from Firaxis will be on top of the Warlords code base. Unless there is some horrible crashing bug, no more patches are going to be coming out on top of vanilla civ. If you want there to be improvments to the game, I think you are going to have to ask that they come in the form of patches to warlords.

Let me give you an example, as documented here, the 1.52 patch of vanilla civ changed the way combat is calculated, making a difference in strength be much more important. The vanilla civ AI was never changed to know about this. So all versions of the vanilla civ AI, including 161, calculate their odds incorrectly. This is one big reason why CivAIs will attack sometimes when they have almost zero chance to win, and also why they sometimes will not attack when they actually have decent chances. This is actually a pretty huge error the AI makes. Warlords fixes this bug. This is one reason why the Warlods AI seems smarter. I thought the following examples were pretty telling:

Attacker strength: 500
Defender strength: 660
Human calculated Combat odds: 22
Vanilla AI calculated Combat odds: 43
Warlords AI calculated Combat odds: 27
------ Combat odds -------
Attacker strength: 500
Defender strength: 440
Human calculated Combat odds: 69
Vanilla AI calculated Combat odds: 53
Warlords AI calculated Combat odds: 69

(Note that stength numbers are multiplied by 100 to make them integers)

I think you could make a decent argument on this bug alone that it would be better to run events using a 'vanilla mod' on top of warlords, (to make the gameplay the same as vanilla if you do not like warlords changes), just to get the AI improvements.

Now I am not suggesting that be done (at least not right away), but do think that a transition to Warlords is just a matter of time, eventually it will have to be done.

I think a good way to start it is to try some adventures.

-Iustus

[mostly_harmless]

There is more than one truth out there .... :-)

One could argue that all this is basically a nice way to make money. Sell a faulty product and have the customer pay for fixes.
From what I heard so far the new unit trebuchet is overpowered in Warlords. Now will we see a free patch to fix that or will there be a new expansion to be released just before x-mas, which is supposed to fix all known bugs.
A manufacturer with this politics will certainly loose some customers for his next new game.

This is all just thinking. For me the vanilla version is fine and I have lots of fun. Also from the "testing" here at RB I don't see any major flaws.
If the RB events shift over to Warlords eventually I will have to make the decision whether to buy Warlords or not. By that time it will probably be very cheap.

[jdotmi]

A manufacturer with this politics will certainly loose some customers for his next new game.

Have you ever played The Sims? Both PC series of it have been bug-ridden and player-patched up the yin-yang, and yet it, and its expansions, continue to be one of the best selling computer games ever. And they do have expansions every six months or so, which people rant and rave about having to buy for some mysterious bug fix, and yet continue to buy anyway.

They do typically release one more patch for the previous version once an expansion hits, but that patch is usually already done by the time the expansion hits the shelves and is already contained in the expansion. Plus, unlike Civ, you can't just load up the earlier version and play it once you've installed the expansion.

In terms of Civ IV, I wouldn't be completely surprised if they did release one more patch™ for Vanilla Civ IV, but I'm not going to hold my breath on it.


*edited because I can't spell*

[mostly_harmless]

Have you ever played The Sims? Both PC series of it have been bug-ridden and player-patched up the yin-yang, and yet it, and its expansions, continue to be one of the best selling computer games ever. And they do have expansions every six months or so, which people rant and rave about having to buy for some mysterious bug fix, and yet continue to buy anyway.

There you go. I am right about human civilisation breaking apart soon!

Soap operas and The Sims are just for brainwashing and lulling of the masses, while THE EVIL takes over the world!

[mbuna120]

One could argue that all this is basically a nice way to make money

A business is still a business. If you take an enterprise's ability to make money away, who will own a business and provide a product? I don't fault companies for trying to make a profit. Walk a mile in another's shoes to better understand their motives. If blame were to be placed, it should be on piracy. And vanilla was patched before warlords. They didn't sell a faulty product on purpose and refuse to fix it. And that's my 2gpt

[Sirian]

There comes a point with every game where sales drop to the point that they cannot pay for continued development support. If you want there to continue to be patches, then there must be an expansion, or the game will be declared dead. The only way to prevent this if you do not want to buy the expansion, is to go and buy extra copies of the vanilla game.

Players would be wise to figure out what matters most to them. Setting the bar too high can indeed lead developers to "give up on" a market and aim elsewhere. The players can then end up with nothing.

However, developers must be pushed to innovate, or it won't happen. The only message that counts is the ones sent by dollars. Word of mouth ends up being a critical factor, as some folks take the plunge, report their results to others, and then either the cautious ones decide to jump in, or they do not.

Games are not just competing with other games. They are competing also with books, movies, TV, family time, and everything else that people could choose to invest their time and energy in to.

There has to be a line somewhere, where a game or expansion simply does not offer enough to justify support.

If enough of a demand is there, then the visionaries who figure it out and are first to step up will reap the profits. The free market can be clumsy, and it often ill serves the niches, overplay trends and copycatting, but still rewards innovators handsomely and enables many creative and good products.


Why did RBCiv support Play the World? I think the time was ripe. The extra civs/leaders were a plus -- and are a plus for Warlords. That was only part of it, though. The real answers were unfolding behind the scenes.

In particular, for me as a community elder, I also saw -very- encouraging movement within Firaxis by that point. They were actively responding to the fan base, and more than this, the game was GETTING BETTER. Much better. Way WAY better than it was in the original release. That was about the time Soren made contact with me and we started to talk AI and game balance issues. He had already Chosen Wisely™ on so many things in the Civ3 patching process, some of which came from him watching RB and finding our criticisms to be valid and actionable. So in this case it was largely a matter of deciding to throw support behind the developer to help build momentum.

That PTW had no broken SP features on release helped a lot, too. RB held back on moving to the second Civ3 expansion because early feedback on it revealed numerous major and minor bugs, and numerous poor choices on the design front in terms of game balance. At that point, the developer had stopped moving in the right direction with Civ3, in large part because the chief architect of progress was already off the scene as a driving force and on to driving Civ4 instead. RB tournaments moved slowly to Conquests, but the SG side of our community, led by Charis in his last to-date hurrah with Civ, embraced Conquests pretty closely. The SG players got their money's worth, I think, because game balance is less important to a single game than it is to a tournament.


Warlords has about the same level of content as did PTW, for single player. Yet with Civ3, the situation was that the initial release had limited promise and active problems, and the patching moved steadily and rapidly to improve on these. Civ4's initial release was much more solid, but the patching was inconsistent and in some ways experimental, unsettling rather than soldifying things. (I parked the Epics for MONTHS over waiting for the Epic game speed settings to settle down, and that was only one aspect.) That was a shaky start.

Is the Civ franchise still moving forward? Honestly, I don't know. I think it stalled briefly, at least. If the Warlords patches go far enough, that might be a good sign. PTW by itself probably did not warrant unconditional support, but at the time I thought Firaxis was moving so strongly in the right direction that they deserved benefit of the doubt. Now I'm more cautious. Civ4 has raised the bar. The danger of raising the bar is that expectations are RIGHTFULLY raised along with it. What was good enough to win my support for PTW is not good enough any more. The standard (for me) is not where is the absolute level of quality, but whether that level is continuing to advance. If it backslides, why should we support it? It's not enough to retread the same ground. Griselda, Cyrene, Sulla and I are playing Diablo 1 on a weekly basis in large part because the gameplay there still represents an achievement pinnacle unmatched by sequels and clones. A game must be worthy of support, or supporting it is counterproductive. If new products are significantly inferior to old ones, players might as well stick with the old ones.

I'm not sure where Warlords will end up. I'm not even sure if I can be objective about it. I can be fair about it, though. I'll pitch RB events to wherever the demand lies. We are starting, finally, to get some demand for Warlords events, so there's room enough to give it a spin and see what happens from there.


- Sirian