Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[Mardoc]

I largely agree with what you say here, Mardoc.

Heh - and after your clarification I'm on the same page as you are, too. The strange optimism of low expectations: maybe this time I can be pleasantly surprised!

The lack of ethics in Civilization V is appalling.

Although I see where you're coming from on this, it seems like something that would be very fraught. If you go beyond the very most simplistic ethical choices, you're bound to mix in politics. If you mix in politics, most people won't be having fun anymore. Even if the game agrees with me, I don't want it to be political.

[T-hawk]

T-Hawk, I own both Suburbia and Castles of Mad King Ludwig (same designer) and I like both as interesting games with a lot of thinking and planning involved. For 6, I played Quartermaster General w/ my group and would recommend it (seats exactly 6, it's a 3v3 WW2 game).

Holy crap, this is freaky, my group just got introduced to Quartermaster General too that same day. Definitely an interesting game, that's the modernized streamlined version of Risk that's been sought after for a while. But our problem was all those supply-line and adjacency rules that that nobody could internalize and intuit. It was badly explained by a store employee, who continually came back over and found that we'd done something wrong. We eventually aborted after a few episodes of that. It feels like this wants to be a computer game with the machine adjudicating the legality rules.

Instead of a stack of doom sitting in a pile in the middle of the floor, we had a carpet of doom covering the whole damn house! And here we have Ed Beach calling that a "beautiful win."

No, that's not what Ed said, but apparently everyone on all the forums is misunderstanding that. The beautiful win is the tactical situations that arise from 1upt. That there are real turn-by-turn decisions with the units other than shoving them into a giant stack. That aspect of Civ 5 actually still is fun and for all levels of skill.

You're right that the carpet of doom does kill that, because that robs what should be the tactical decisions and turns it into a game of squeezing your traffic through the bottlenecks. But I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to judge that Ed doesn't understand that. I bet he does. It's very possible to preserve the 1upt tactical combat while redesigning the systems around it to alleviate its problems.

[Sareln]

Holy crap, this is freaky, my group just got introduced to Quartermaster General too that same day. Definitely an interesting game, that's the modernized streamlined version of Risk that's been sought after for a while. But our problem was all those supply-line and adjacency rules that that nobody could internalize and intuit. It was badly explained by a store employee, who continually came back over and found that we'd done something wrong. We eventually aborted after a few episodes of that. It feels like this wants to be a computer game with the machine adjudicating the legality rules.

We've played it a total of 3 times now, we've managed to get the logistics rules solid, though there was definitely a lot of looking at the rulebook on the offturn to make sure our assumptions were valid. The rule we actually messed up was draw 10 discard 3 at the beginning of the game, we were just drawing 7 and it led to some very swingy card-luck.

No, that's not what Ed said, but apparently everyone on all the forums is misunderstanding that. The beautiful win is the tactical situations that arise from 1upt. That there are real turn-by-turn decisions with the units other than shoving them into a giant stack. That aspect of Civ 5 actually still is fun and for all levels of skill.

You're right that the carpet of doom does kill that, because that robs what should be the tactical decisions and turns it into a game of squeezing your traffic through the bottlenecks. But I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to judge that Ed doesn't understand that. I bet he does. It's very possible to preserve the 1upt tactical combat while redesigning the systems around it to alleviate its problems.

I think my primary concern at this point, with 1UPT, is how well the AI can and can't use the mechanics. For me in CIV V, matched-technology or even -1 tech differentials were rollups since the AI couldn't manage the combat.

[Mr. Cairo]

As GJ said, Civ 4's stacks of doom and Civ 5's carpets of doom were primarily a single-player problem, resulting from poor AI. But as multiplayer games, both Civ 4 and Civ 5 excel. Although MP Civ 4 is certainly played less than SP Civ 4 these days (this community notwithstanding), MP Civ 5 has been a huge success. All my friends who play Civ 5 do so for the MP. I myself watch the Yogscast play games of Civ 5 and enjoy not just the personalities, but the gameplay as well, even though I disliked the game when I play it myself. Despite the fact that in their attempt to fix a SP Civ 4 issue they created a different SP Civ 5 issue, they still managed to create a good MP game, just one that was very different from MP Civ 4.

This appears to be what the developers of Civ 6 have missed (maybe). Their focus on SP is understandable, MP has always taken a back seat to SP in 4X games, but with Civ 6 Firaxis had an opportunity to reverse that, and design the game from the ground up for the MP experience. Sure, all the hardcore 4Xers who've been playing turn-based SP strategy games for most of their lives (Personally I started with Steel Panthers and Birth of the Federation at age 7) will probably give it a pass, but most of that type of player stuck with Civ 4 anyway, and will continue to do so. Mechanics that are designed for MP can still make a good single-player game, but it's a lot easier to screw up when going the other way round.

[Sareln]

As GJ said, Civ 4's stacks of doom and Civ 5's carpets of doom were primarily a single-player problem, resulting from poor AI. But as multiplayer games, both Civ 4 and Civ 5 excel. Although MP Civ 4 is certainly played less than SP Civ 4 these days (this community notwithstanding), MP Civ 5 has been a huge success. All my friends who play Civ 5 do so for the MP. I myself watch the Yogscast play games of Civ 5 and enjoy not just the personalities, but the gameplay as well, even though I disliked the game when I play it myself. Despite the fact that in their attempt to fix a SP Civ 4 issue they created a different SP Civ 5 issue, they still managed to create a good MP game, just one that was very different from MP Civ 4.

This appears to be what the developers of Civ 6 have missed (maybe). Their focus on SP is understandable, MP has always taken a back seat to SP in 4X games, but with Civ 6 Firaxis had an opportunity to reverse that, and design the game from the ground up for the MP experience. Sure, all the hardcore 4Xers who've been playing turn-based SP strategy games for most of their lives (Personally I started with Steel Panthers and Birth of the Federation at age 7) will probably give it a pass, but most of that type of player stuck with Civ 4 anyway, and will continue to do so. Mechanics that are designed for MP can still make a good single-player game, but it's a lot easier to screw up when going the other way round.

Ah BotF, that brings back memories

I think there are rule-of-thumb numbers around that puts the MP share of 4x's at 5%, or some similarly low - tiny fraction, so that's a thing to keep in mind.

Also, based on the interviews that Soren and Jon have given over the years, my impression of the CIV4/5 development cycle is 1. minimum playable model so that devs can play the game against each other -> 2. eventually there's an AI, so technically all the games are built MP up, but their focus is (rightly) on the SP experience.

[DMOC]

I am not a huge fan of the graphics, but if the game play looks good, then I'll get the game.

Fortunately, that fall is going to be super-busy for me, so there's no way I'd be able to play this game until December 2016 at the earilest, and by then I may have a good idea as to whether or not I should get it.

[Hail]

Also, based on the interviews that Soren and Jon have given over the years, my impression of the CIV4/5 development cycle is 1. minimum playable model so that devs can play the game against each other -> 2. eventually there's an AI, so technically all the games are built MP up, but their focus is (rightly) on the SP experience.

from what I read and saw, civ4's development process was exactly like that.
the sad state civ5 was released in hits that civ5's development process was a bit different - an awesome single player experience.

[v8mark]

Very interesting discussion. I love RB for discussions like this!

My sense is (and has been for a couple of years) that a lot of people at Firaxis are aware that Civ5 was fairly fundamentally broken. They polished the game to the point where it was a fun game for a lot of people, but it never had the depth of Civ4. That's the way it goes. Civ5 is kind of fun if you treat it basically as a storyboard exercise rather than a game where you have meaningful choices. You definitely get the 'sense' that you're managing a country, or an empire. There's just not a whole lot of decisions to make.

The famous RB post by Luddite (which I won't post in its entirety, but which can be found towards the bottom of this page on Sulla's website) broke down very nicely why 1UPT was a (one might even say the) primary cause of the game being broken. Basically, having military units take up so much space on the map had knock-on effects across the rest of the game, from production to resource gathering to city improvements and multipliers. The solution to this problem is to make hexes smaller and have the map (in terms of number of hexes, at least) be considerably bigger.

With that in mind, the million-dollar question for me is: did the dev team know this when building the game from the ground up, and are hexes correspondingly smaller? The fact that Beach has mentioned improvements on hexes gives me some hope that they did, and they are. The danger to me is that this knowledge (especially if it's incomplete knowledge) gets compromised by the whole Firaxis narrative of SoD bad, 1UPT good which the company has to at least pay lip service to. It's the sort of area in which designers and marketers are liable to clash, and the danger is that a half-assed solution gets implemented that no-one's happy with, least of all us. Such is the way of the world.

This isn't a modern or digital-distribution thing; it's how game design (and business) has always operated. Just occasionally you get a very talented team who have either the communications skill to sell their vision to the company or the political/corporate leverage within the company to push through with it anyway. That's when Civ4 happens.

[Brian Shanahan]

And if I'm being honest, all I want in a Civ game is just Civ4.5,

To be fair they have to make some radical changes between versions, they're coming out with a new game, not an expansion. I think that's a good thing, if it works out then we get a genuinely different experience, if not there are always other games to play. If they just made a civ4.5(or 5.5) it would be a waste of an opportunity IMO.

That's fair, but at I don't begrudge them for trying something different. I think what actually gets under people's skin - or at least mine - isn't that Firaxis has the gall to make a brand new game, it's that they trash on their old games to sell the new one, usually ignorantly, using the fact they officially represent "Sid Meier's Civilization" as a franchise to give them authority.

Like, take 1UPT for an example. What was the reason Firaxis said they wanted 1UPT? Because it was something new? Because Jon Shafer was also a huge fan of Panzer General, and wanted to try integrating its tactical combat in with civ-style empire building? No, it was to "fix civ4's combat model" which centered around "stacks of doom." Over and over, we'd hear, from both the official sources and fanboys, how Civ4's stacks of doom were ahistorical, simplistic, broken, unfun, and boring because it was all about just cramming tons of units into a single tile and then mindlessly walking towards the enemy. And, for the single player experience, this often was indeed the case. However, in MP, it doesn't happen so much because it is inefficient, slow, inflexible, and leads to overcommitting. That begs the question: if human players try to avoid an SoD strategy against each other despite knowing about it, does Civ4, mechanically speaking, actually have an intractable SoD problem?

The answer, of course, is no. The Civ4 "SoD problem" was actually an AI problem. First, consider defense. The AI doesn't understand when and where another player will attack, so it will spam defensive units nonstop and put them in *every* city so that the player can't snipe them for free. (and then laugh about it on internet forums) A side effect of this defensive unit spam means that the AI will very rarely try to attack out of its cities at attackers, because it allocates its defensive units as defensive units. On top of that, the AI gets production bonuses at higher difficulty levels (due to the AI having a very low skill cap), so them having more units than the player will always just be a fact of life. Combining these two things with the fact that the defender naturally has an advantage leads one to the necessity to be extremely hammer-efficient when conquering an AI. You will need to kill 2 or 3 hammers of theirs for every one you lose in order to win. That leads to strategies that combine siege with a superior tech unit in order to minimize losses. (At higher skill levels, horse-based attacks can work too, but the SoD invasion was an obvious fact of life for most players) Now look at AI offensive. It is an unfortunate fact that the AI is not very good at coordinating a war. So, what's the easiest way to ensure that it at least doesn't embarrass itself too badly when it invades someone? Well, group up all its units in a single stack and move that in, of course! It's easier to coordinate and ensures that, at the very least, the player won't pick them apart piecemeal and actually has to do real work to defend themselves. Thus, you had both the player and the AI both favoring SoD tactics simply because AIs were in the game. However, in the press (and at the keyboard), the designers of Civ5 didn't seem to understand that. Instead, they threw out the baby with the bathwater in an attempt to "fix" the problem and ended up creating an AI that was even worse at coordinating war than the old one!! Instead of a stack of doom sitting in a pile in the middle of the floor, we had a carpet of doom covering the whole damn house! And here we have Ed Beach calling that a "beautiful win." Perhaps, as T-Hawk says, that there's some real depth there that reveal itself in human vs human situations, similar to what happened in Civ4, but that's besides the point. The point is that they changed mechanics without understanding it was an AI problem and ended up creating an even more glaring AI problem, but still talk as if the idea of going back to unit stacks was backwards, brain-damaged thinking.

And you could go on and on with this same sorta thing. Civ5 players tend to beeline one particular tech? Clearly, the idea of choosing your own techs is a broken and boring idea, so let's try to increase their strategic decisions... but instead of rebalancing the tech tree, let's add random bonuses so that instead the player has no real choice at all! Players like to build certain wonders every game? Let's make it so whether they can even build the wonder or not randomly depends on their starting land, and say that Civilization VI will be "the first Civilization where the geography of your nation influences every aspect of the game!" Whether they actually believe this or are just saying whatever nonsense for marketing reasons (although note that they really did believe themselves about SoD/1UPT), it's still infuriating to see these guys putting on such high airs while saying such stupid shit.

And, by the way, it's not just us getting worked up about this - I've been reading Civ5 fan reactions to Civ6 on other forums and they seem just as annoyed about stuff like the "geography of your nation" quote and the "beautiful win" quote, etc, as we are.

Thanks Joey, you said what I wanted to say, and well.

[T-hawk]

the whole Firaxis narrative of SoD bad, 1UPT good which the company has to at least pay lip service to. It's the sort of area in which designers and marketers are liable to clash, and the danger is that a half-assed solution gets implemented that no-one's happy with, least of all us.

Or the upside is a workable compromise that does satisfy everyone. Give Ed a chance here, folks.

Nobody noticed this paragraph from the r-p-s article:

There are also new support class units, many of which were formally designated as military units in Civ V. These are units that are more sensibly depicted as special equipment embedded with a larger unit rather than standalone figures on the map. I’d expect the likes of anti-air and anti-tank units to fall into that category, along with other specialists. It’ll also be possible, under certain circumstances, to stack two or three units of the same type to create a powerful combined force. These are exceptions to the non-stacking rule rather than symptomatic of a shift away from it.

What we want is to fit more strategy on a battle front, the perimeter of a city being the most common front in Civ. How do we do that? The cities could be more diffuse to make more space relevant. Or the hexes could be smaller to fit more units. Or we could fit more units per hex. Or we could fit more decisions and strategy per unit. Ed is applying all of these approaches and they're all reasonable. Figure out exactly what needs to count against the 1upt limit and what can be moved out into other layers like equipment. Beyond Earth already moved in this direction, putting satellites early in the tech tree, literally moving some of the units off the map to alleviate the space crunch.

I think Ed and Firaxis do very much understand the limitations of 1upt and what has to be done to hammer that into a good fun game. They have for years, since pretty soon after Civ 5's release. We just still have a lot of SJWs around crusading against Civ 5's release-day mistakes that are six years old now.