Pre-Release CIV VI Discussion

[BRickAstley]

Well I will admit I default to being massively skeptical, so thanks for pushing back against that T-Hawk. I'm feeling more willing to give it a chance than I was when first seeing the announcement video, that's for sure.

[Ichabod]

I disliked a lot of the new mechanics introduced in Civ 5 expansions, which seemed just a bunch of "get free stuff" features (religion, espionage, archeology). But I feel that I've made a mistake by thinking this is an indication that Civ 6 (with the same designer of the expansions) will be a bad game. Expansions need to come with a lot of shiny stuff to sell, so the designer has its hands tied and needs to do it (archeology is the main example here, I feel), compounding on the problem of already having its hands tied by the overall design on the main game, that can't really change that much.

I'd say the culture victory change in BNW is perhaps the main indicator of how we can expect Civ 6 to be. The culture victory was changed from a passive approach to a way more active one, where you compete against the other civs and need to plan and take specific actions to achieve it (instead of just generating your own civ's culture). Reading about the science boosts from certain actions, the design team is saying the same thing: research was too passive, we want it to be more active. That's a design philosophy I can get behind with, so it makes me more optimistic about the new game.

One thing is undeniable, I think: Civ 5 BNW is better than Civ 5 vanilla. If you take a look at BNW/G&K systems by themselves, they seem rather underwhelming; but as a whole, I feel like they work to provide a pleasant experience.

[Commodore]

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.

So have you explored BE?

[Gavagai]

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.

This is a very good post GJ. To this I'd like to add that it's simply impossible to make a good strategy game with 1UPT rule. I'm surprised, how some posters here don't understand it.

Any strategic choice amounts to finding a balance between concentration and dispersal of resources and the more basic units of resources you have, the more nuanced choice you can make. If you have 100 units, you can split them between 5 spots as 20 - 20 - 20 - 20 - 20 or 30 - 14 - 14 - 14 - 14 or in any other combination. If you have 2 units, you can split them only between 2 spots and only in equal amount. From this aspect 100 units is better than 2 even if equal in strength and cost (also this is the reason why building Death Star was an extraodinary stupid decision by Palpatine, one of the things because of wich I dislike Star Wars).
Now, 1upt rule makes necessary to introduce a hard cap on the amount of units which serves to lessen strategic flexibility of players. In wargames this is OK because they are relatively simple games where nuanced strategic decisions are not expected or necessary. In true strategy games, however, nuanced strategic decisions are the core of gameplay, under no circumstances you should anything to hinder them.

[SevenSpirits]

In true strategy games, however, nuanced strategic decisions are the core of gameplay, under no circumstances you should anything to hinder them.

This is utter bullshit. You obviously can't have a game design guideline that says "more choice is always better" or every game ends up with an infinite amount of choice and is impossible to actually play.

More player choice does not make for an inherently more strategic game. Take the game of "pick a number, highest number wins". You have literally infinite options (woohoo) but strategically it's worthless. Compare that to Go, widely agreed to be a highly strategic game, which has 1upt, doesn't allow units to move at all, only lets you do one thing per turn, and has a very small number of moves available each turn. One of these games lets the players make nuanced, flexible choices. The other one lets them make meaningful choices.

[The Black Sword]

To this I'd like to add that it's simply impossible to make a good strategy game with 1UPT rule.

But we can think of a civ 4 'stack' as 1 unit in the tile with a set of properties. Aren't 1UPT and and MUPT the same in that sense? You just have different rules about how you can change the 'properties' of that unit. In fact Civ6 seems to be moving a bit in this direction with the introduction of armies(IIRC they used a different word). You can combine ~3 units(I'm sure they have a limit) into one stronger one. It doesn't sound like they'll allow you to split them up again though.

It's a fair point though that the emphasis of the game should stay strategical and not tactical. Does anyone have other examples of strategy games using 1UPT? It is mostly tactical games that come to mind for me. The other two issues that come to mind are unit density and unit speed. It sounds like they're addressing unit density but I don't see speed brought up a lot. I know they doubled everyone to 2MP but even that is slow IMO, particularly in any sort of terrain, it really increases traffic jam potential. You can't go much faster without a tactical layer like OH mentioned previously. I assume they're not going with that approach or they would have shown it off.

[T-hawk]

So have you explored BE?

http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...#pid515476

[Sirian]

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.

Understanding that 1UPT has problems, for sure. How to hammer it in to a good fun game, probably, up to a point.

"Democracy is the worst form of government -- except for all the others that have been tried."

A case can easily be made for why 1UPT is the worst basis for a 4X combat engine, but that case can also be made for SoD or anything in between. It's more a matter of taste as this point, as to which set of flaws you hate the most.

Like real-world governing, the governing of how armed forces are presented in empire games is messy and flawed affair. The idea of "units" -- large groups of soldiers and their equipment represented as a single thing in the game mechanics -- seems to be the most sound concept, but where do we go from there?


Space empire games designed with nodes -- stars, planets, moons, etc -- forego the option of 1UPT because they don't have the T available to spread out the carpet of doom. RTS space games can shed the idea of the T as well by making their Ts so tiny they cease to matter, but then the units can group so tightly together, they play more like a SoD than a CoD, even when they are restricted to one per tile.

Unless an army has tactical advantages like defending at Thermopylae or bombing helpless ground units from orbit, battles tend to resolve according to pure numbers. (Them as have the mostest are the winniest.) What is a game designer supposed to do to try to overcome this? The ultimate solution as a player in empire games is to outproduce or outtech the opponent -- or both -- and win the war before ever firing the first shot.

The list of design challenges is long -- very, very long. There are more ways to go wrong than you can shake a stick at. There are more ways to go wrong than cliches about going wrong. And that's just scary.


The idea of rescaling the map so that hexes represent a smaller area (and the map contains more of them) is probably a good concept to pursue. This would fix the biggest mess in Civ5, which its zealous downscaling of everything -- cities, pop counts, units -- in pursuit of trying to solve the map clutter by having a drastically smaller game scale.

However, based on what I see in the few screenshots of Civ6, it does NOT appear to me as if the "more and smaller tiles" approach was tried. A hex (or "tile") appears to be about the same scale as it was in Civ5, which was roughly unchanged from Sid's original scale over a quarter century ago now. That, and I think in an interview Ed said cities remain on the same scale. If true, then 6 faces the exact same cluttering problems as 5 did, and we will just have to wait and see how much the folks inside the building have actually learned from the previous version.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

it's simply impossible to make a good strategy game with 1UPT ... In true strategy games, however, nuanced strategic decisions are the core of gameplay, under no circumstances you should anything to hinder them.

This is utter bullshit. ... Go -- has 1upt, doesn't allow units to move at all, only lets you do one thing per turn, and has a very small number of moves available each turn.

Oooh. Taken to the woodshed on that one.

Let me pile on by pointing out that chess is also 1UPT. There's your two longest-lived and most-played strategy games of all time.

Sorry, G. Perhaps if you clarify a more narrow scope than is implied by the words "strategy game".

Even so, I'll have to side with SevenSpirits. More choice is not always better, even in empire games, aka "4X". Clearly too little is fatal, but there's a sweet spot in there somewhere, and exactly where that lies is more a matter of taste than of science.

Now on the other hand, this "pick a number, highest wins" design sounds promising. I think I'll rename myself to NineSpirits and claim my first victory.


- NineSpirits

[T-hawk]

Well I will admit I default to being massively skeptical, so thanks for pushing back against that T-Hawk.

I'm skeptical by nature too. But you guys are going so far off the deep end that I'm more skeptical about the skepticism.

Unless an army has tactical advantages like defending at Thermopylae or bombing helpless ground units from orbit, battles tend to resolve according to pure numbers. (Them as have the mostest are the winniest.) What is a game designer supposed to do to try to overcome this?

Generate those tactical advantages. That is what 1upt does and why Civ 5 was so eager to adopt the concept. Get battles running on tactical maneuvers rather than on having the mostest. Get a battle system that hinges on getting your cavalry through to kill off the archery units rather than on having brought more cavalry. Firaxis has actually done this already: the land battles of Sid Meier's Pirates.

1upt is really a sneaky way of introducing diminishing returns to work against the "mostest" principle. Your fourth soldier is less valuable than your first three because he gets less opportunity to reach the front line and fight. Problem is, players internalize this as "traffic jam" and feel cheated out of their chance to use that fourth unit. This tension isn't easy to resolve, but I'm willing to give Ed a chance rather than already proclaiming it can't be done.

Let me pile on by pointing out that chess is also 1UPT. There's your two longest-lived and most-played strategy games of all time.

Good points, but just to throw in a counterexample: Backgammon, which is also that same level of historical classic and does not function as 1UPT. In fact, establishing 2UPT is the entire principle of its tactics. Ed's idea of stacking equipment with units actually sounds not all that far off from the 2UPT principle of Backgammon.