sunrise089 Wrote:@DerangedDuck:
Wow, what great commentary. I agree wholehardedly with (almost?) everything you said. Your discussion of "vital" vs "non-vital" was one of the best Civ game mechanic discussions I've ever seen.
Thanks
It's always nice to know the stuff I typed was worthwhile to somebody.Quote:As for your contention that espionage is a decision already made however, you overlook one possibility: perhaps the developers are interested more in selling copies than in making a balanced game (Civ3: Conquests anyone). In that case, goodbye estabvlished game mechanic, hello overpower espionage feature.Given that you're paying to build and deploy spies and paying more to actually mount missions and probably having a substantial failure rate, I'm not terribly worried about the feature being overpowered. I'm going to wave around Alpha Centauri as an example. In Alpha Centauri, most probe team actions were free, with the exception of taking over enemy cities and units, which cost cash (with a higher price close to their capital). With high level (elite) probe teams, the success rate for most of the lesser actions was close to 100% and the chance of losing the probe team was pretty low. However, probe teams were visible on the map, could be attacked normally, and had to defeat all enemy probe teams in a city before they could make an attempt, so there was plenty of opportunity to stop them if you wanted to do so. This whole thing didn't feel like it was overpowered or game dominating. If somebody were to say they felt otherwise, I'd have to respect that, but to me it was just an important part of the game and with the BTS stuff probably being weaker and costlier, there hopefully won't be a problem.
One Alpha Centauri probe team action of note was the 'infiltrate data links' option. Once you did this, for the rest of the game you got to view all their city and information screens. The only information you didn't have was world map info (which needed to be stolen separately) and exact unit locations. You could also get infiltration information by being elected planetary governor (anybody who has contact with all factions can call this election, no technology needed) or by building the empath guild secret project (wonder). Anyway, for any kind of economic warfare, this sort of thing is very important. There weren't strategic resources, but you could destroy buildings in cities with probe teams and bombard or pillage terrain improvements. If you just blew up somebody's hologram theatre, it's nice to be able to see that you actually threw the city into disorder and if you're trying to starve a city by pillaging their farms, it's good to actually know that the city is running a food deficit and will starve down in 8 turns. You just can't do that sort of thing with vanilla Civ4. How often have you started a war with a rival just so you could pillage, then sit on a couple of their luxury resources, knowing that even though you can't take any of their cities, you'll be severely impacting their economy? But if you can look at their cities and see the 13 rebellious people you've created and watch their economy nosedive, I bet you'd do it more often.
Although I guess there were some game mechanics/balance issues (at least according to Sulla's website) and the AI was not what one would call "competent" or "challenging", in a lot of respects I found Alpha Centauri to be the best of any of the civish games I've played and there are a lot of elements besides easy espionage I would like to see show up in civ. For example: the concept of bribing other factions in global council votes. This would mean that you could not only try to pass UN resolutions, but could actually impact whether they pass or not by doing some political maneuvering so the UN isn't just a "Secretary General tries to screw up world" kind of thing. It also had a "vassal" system that worked, at least for me. After someone had been pounded hard enough, they might surrender. It was basically a slightly one sided permanent alliance. If you asked them for a technology, they gave it to you. If you didn't ask them, they eventually showed up and gave it to you anyway. You got their planetary council vote for a token bribe. If you wanted to, you could help them out too by giving them techs or bases or colony pods. This was a good idea because the way commerce worked, the value of trade routes with allies was doubled and one of your cities got exactly one trade route for each faction, if that faction had enough cities to pair up. Trade routes were a percentage of combined commerce: up to 25%(or thereabouts) per faction with global trade pact and all commerce technologies, meaning that for the cost of an inexpensive donated colony pod, you could get a huge boost in income. Alpha Centauri also had a nice mechanism for encouraging you to not put everything into science. If you didn't keep the sliders balanced, a portion of the output got lost. So, if you cranked the research slider up to 100% from 50%, you wouldn't double you research, you might increase it by 1/2 or something. You might be willing to trade money for research points on a 1 for 1 basis as in civ4, but it starts to become less attractive when it's 2 for 1.
Of course, don't let me forget the really spectacular mood enhancing features of Alpha Centauri. The voice acting and text blurbs gave me a really strong feel for the Alpha Centauri world, bringing it beyond the level of abstract strategic war game and into the realm of "Wow, this is what our future could be like." Even better, they gave it a connection to present day Earth by giving the factions ideological roots that you can see by reading a newspaper, yet avoided spoiling it by becoming too mired in the reality that people play games to get a vacation from. And when they translated quotes from the likes of Sun Tzu and Nietzsche, they did it better than anybody on the net. One wouldn't usually get very emotionally involved in a strategy game (nor would one want to), but with stuff like, "No longer mere Earth beings or Planet beings are we, but bright children of the stars. Together we will dance in and out of ten billion years until the stars themselves grow old and weary and our thoughts turn again to the beginning.", spoken in a hybrid Deidre/Planet voice so that you know they're no longer completely distinct entities...well...it's hard not to. Winning the game by launching a space ship to Alpha Centauri just can't hold a candle to winning the game by becoming Alpha Centauri. With only a single voice actor and Leonard Nimoy's dry Civ 4 dictation of abstract proverb level quotes, Civ 4 just doesn't carry the same impact. Of course, I don't think you'd want exactly the same impact, but I bet they could have used some real archaeologists and historians spouting their stuff effectively to get a better feel for "Wow, we just discovered pottery." It probably would have cost less too. Hmm, a job for Sulla?
Quote:One thing you left out is how potentially catestrophic BTS could be for the MP crowd. Aside from odd and unbalanced modern war which will probably affect SP folks more, siege weapons have been "nerfed into oblivion" to quote MookieNJ over at the Civ Player Ladder forums. Additionally, has anyone checked Sitting Bull's UU + UB lately? 20 turns into an online quick game, with a research path of Mystacism-Hunting-Archery-Bronze (and quicker if Mysticism and Hunting are starting techs) you can have a 4 promotion archer and a strength 8 vs melee unit outside an enemy city. Tell me any opponent will be able to recover from that.
Reading the description of the siege weapon changes on civ fanatics, I didn't think there would be all that big an impact. My reading was that instead of having a 25% chance of withdrawing safely when your HP reaches 0, you have a 100% of withdrawing safely when the enemy's HP reaches some unspecified number. If you took a catapult against mechs, you would pretty much always die. On the other hand, if you went against a weak or damaged top defender, you might have a 100% chance of withdrawing safely after you did your collateral damage, even if under the current system you would have lost the battle. My thinking is that the main effect of this is to prevent people from running around with pure catapult stacks, which might've happened in multi-player. Now you'd need to bring escorts to protect them and finish off wounded foes. I've seen no mention of a change in collateral damage formula and bombardment, which for me has always been their use. I don't expect to kill things with catapults. I do expect to soften them up. Of course, it would be nice if walls, castles, and 80% cultural defense took more than 4 accuracy catapult shots to wipe out. I might actually have a use for them then. Incidentally, unless they've changed the formula, catapults will still have a better hammers/HP collateral damage ratio than either cannon or artillery.
-kcauQ -kcauQ
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