(May 23rd, 2016, 16:13)Sirian Wrote: There is a dimension to huge maps that just isn't there on regular and small maps. ...
Civ3 was the last civ title to support this flavor, and I miss it significantly.
I understand that perfectly. There are a few us crazy enough to still play huge Civ3 maps. I just finished another of my world maps SG, and that is small compared to the CCM game I just started an SG of.
The shear scope of those games in itself is a challenge to wrap up before you run out of time. Taking out 200 cities to dominate is a lot different that taking our 20 before the clock runs out.
(May 23rd, 2016, 12:56)Borsche Wrote: No one wants to micro 50+ cities.
There is a dimension to huge maps that just isn't there on regular and small maps. And it is indeed an ambrosia worth the burden of managing a high number of cities -- when you are in the mood for it. You don't get any special rules or consideration vs smaller maps, so your settlers aren't cheaper, have farther to walk, and don't grow the cities any faster. You don't get relief from military pressures, research pressures, wonder-building issues, and there is more open space in which to spawn barbarians, which you have to contend with. Extra time spent building more settlers means slower progression in your core cities than occurs on smaller maps. You catch a glimpse of the tradeoffs in Civ4 when you are expanding to 6 or 7 cities, but they are a lot more intricate when you are expanding to 20+ cities just to grab your fair share of the land. The ambrosia is sweeter when the game provides more pressures, to where you risk collapse if expanding too fast, neglecting other things in the process.
Civ3 was the last civ title to support this flavor, and I miss it significantly. Not that I played it every game, but some of my most memorable games were on Huge maps, because I remember triumphs and tragedies involving that 17th or 18th city on the border, where the risks were high and the gains were low and fortune favored the bold. When you are rewarded not penalized for reaching for small gains, they can be some of the sweetest, because they can't be found on the roads most traveled.
Civ4 and Civ5 both took a pass on supporting huge-map play. It's an outcome of lead designers who themselves did not play and appreciate -- or even understand the subtleties of -- the huge maps: that there is more to them than just bigger numbers.
The big maps have their down sides, too, and only crazy people play *only* huge maps. But to lose the option to play that occasional huge map and dive in deeper-- The franchise is poorer off for not supporting huge maps any more.
If Civ6 has made room for supporting huge maps once again, I'd buy it on that basis alone (even pre-buy it!), just to see how the unstacked city concept plays out on a grand scale.
- Sirian
Are you just trolling? I often wonder when I read your posts about Civ4, because your tone comes across as so blatantly disingenuous, but this post is seems so out there that I need to straight-up gotta ask you. I mean, T-Hawk just posted a screenshot of an enormous Civ4 map. And, beyond that, the maps for many recent pitboss games on this site, for example, PB27, PB22, and PB18, were even bigger... hell, in PB18, BGN had an empire of more than 100 cities and I don't think ever got over 20% land area. That's a map with 500 cities and over 10000 tiles - how much bigger do you need?
I'm not sure if it qualifies as ambrosia served on a road less traveled or whatever, but Civ III's huge maps are significantly less time-intensive to play than comparable Civ IV offerings. This is mainly because Civ III offers dramatically fewer options for empire & city customization. A third as many tile improvements, far fewer city structures, a much smaller unit selection, and corruption means that most of your holdings past a certain point will hardly produce anything of value anyway until you unlock Police Stations and Communism in the mid-Industrial era. Also, the fairly simplistic AI plays its turns much more quickly and is easier to exploit, so you can romp through its land faster.
I do often prefer its epic scope over Civ IV's- it's certainly more dynamic in enabling massive empires to rise and fall over the course of normal gameplay- but it's also a far less intellectually challenging enterprise. It doesn't take a great deal of empire management or foresight to consistently beat the AI on even the ludicrously unfair upper difficulty levels- just knowledge of some essential economic and AI exploits.
(May 23rd, 2016, 17:41)Bobchillingworth Wrote: I'm not sure if it qualifies as ambrosia served on a road less traveled or whatever, but Civ III's huge maps are significantly less time-intensive to play than comparable Civ IV offerings. This is mainly because Civ III offers dramatically fewer options for empire & city customization. A third as many tile improvements, far fewer city structures, a much smaller unit selection, and corruption means that most of your holdings past a certain point will hardly produce anything of value anyway until you unlock Police Stations and Communism in the mid-Industrial era. Also, the fairly simplistic AI plays its turns much more quickly and is easier to exploit, so you can romp through its land faster.
I do often prefer its epic scope over Civ IV's- it's certainly more dynamic in enabling massive empires to rise and fall over the course of normal gameplay- but it's also a far less intellectually challenging enterprise. It doesn't take a great deal of empire management or foresight to consistently beat the AI on even the ludicrously unfair upper difficult levels- just knowledge of some essential economic and AI exploits.
That's a much fairer appraisal of Civ3's... somewhat questionable idiosyncrasies to me. It's also a model that I would most definitely not like Civ6 to go anywhere near.
(For whatever that's worth from an unabashed Civ3 sceptic, who remembers its release as colossally disappointing after Civ2 and SMAC/X)
(May 23rd, 2016, 16:48)GermanJoey Wrote: Are you just trolling? I often wonder when I read your posts about Civ4, because your tone comes across as so blatantly disingenuous, but this post is seems so out there that I need to straight-up gotta ask you. I mean, T-Hawk just posted a screenshot of an enormous Civ4 map. And, beyond that, the maps for many recent pitboss games on this site, for example, PB27, PB22, and PB18, were even bigger... hell, in PB18, BGN had an empire of more than 100 cities and I don't think ever got over 20% land area. That's a map with 500 cities and over 10000 tiles - how much bigger do you need?
It would be a lot more unbearable to play said Pitboss games with a turn timer of 50 seconds or 2 minutes, to make it feel like a single player game. Which is where that complaint was directed at, I think.
(May 23rd, 2016, 16:48)GermanJoey Wrote: Are you just trolling? I often wonder when I read your posts about Civ4, because your tone comes across as so blatantly disingenuous, but this post is seems so out there that I need to straight-up gotta ask you. I mean, T-Hawk just posted a screenshot of an enormous Civ4 map. And, beyond that, the maps for many recent pitboss games on this site, for example, PB27, PB22, and PB18, were even bigger... hell, in PB18, BGN had an empire of more than 100 cities and I don't think ever got over 20% land area. That's a map with 500 cities and over 10000 tiles - how much bigger do you need?
Civ4 begins with the lid on tight, loosens it, then ultimately takes it off.
Early game: found "too many" cities, get slapped down hard. Better stay within the allowed numbers.
Middle game: numbers loosen, you can found a few more cities if you wish.
Late game: OK, now you can do whatever you like.
Small, medium or large maps, this is the dynamic. It has its up sides compared to Civ3, such as no diminishing returns on production at newer cities. And Civ3 caps out eventually, too, with corruption reducing outlying cities to 1/1. But I didn't set out to make a case that Civ3 is better than Civ4 -- only that the franchise abandoned its support for huge map gameplay.
That restrictuve early game kills the flavor I'm talking about. There is still some of it present -- huge maps of Civ4 do involve higher city counts than small maps of Civ4. But there is nothing "huge" about the early game, just "bigger than normal".
Pointing to the late-game sprawl of Civ4 and saying, "There. There's your huge map play," is missing the point.
We already know that Civ6 is *not* going to copy Civ5's methods of snowball control and empire size pushback. They have said that Happiness will be local per city, again. I haven't worked on Civ6 and don't know what's in it. I doubt it's going to bring back huge map support in full, but if it did, that alone would be worth trying out, from my perspective.
(May 23rd, 2016, 16:48)GermanJoey Wrote: Are you just trolling? I often wonder when I read your posts about Civ4, because your tone comes across as so blatantly disingenuous, but this post is seems so out there that I need to straight-up gotta ask you. I mean, T-Hawk just posted a screenshot of an enormous Civ4 map. And, beyond that, the maps for many recent pitboss games on this site, for example, PB27, PB22, and PB18, were even bigger... hell, in PB18, BGN had an empire of more than 100 cities and I don't think ever got over 20% land area. That's a map with 500 cities and over 10000 tiles - how much bigger do you need?
Civ4 begins with the lid on tight, loosens it, then ultimately takes it off.
Early game: found "too many" cities, get slapped down hard. Better stay within the allowed numbers.
Middle game: numbers loosen, you can found a few more cities if you wish.
Late game: OK, now you can do whatever you like.
Small, medium or large maps, this is the dynamic. It has its up sides compared to Civ3, such as no diminishing returns on production at newer cities. And Civ3 caps out eventually, too, with corruption reducing outlying cities to 1/1. But I didn't set out to make a case that Civ3 is better than Civ4 -- only that the franchise abandoned its support for huge map gameplay.
That restrictuve early game kills the flavor I'm talking about. There is still some of it present -- huge maps of Civ4 do involve higher city counts than small maps of Civ4. But there is nothing "huge" about the early game, just "bigger than normal".
Pointing to the late-game sprawl of Civ4 and saying, "There. There's your huge map play," is missing the point.
Then what is your point? Please clarify specifically what you mean by "huge map play" because to me it still sounds like "playing civ on a huge map."
It sounds like maybe it's more of a pacing issue for you? But then your statement about Civ4 requiring you to "stay within the allowed numbers" doesn't make any sense to me either. My experience with Civ4 is the opposite - whether in SP or MP, the Civ4 early game is mad frenzy to expand as hard and as fast as you possibly can, while juggling other priorities. Yes, you may want to do some other things too - grab early wonders, or aggress a neighbor, or defend against neighbor aggression, or develop your economy to get a leg up on a rival, but this is always a tradeoff. For example:
Here's some some city-count numbers of T100 (375BC) of a recent standard-speed, standardish-map-size, pitboss game, PB29, right around the time when land was mostly completely claimed on the map:
The numbers are useful to illustrate what I mean by tradeoffs, because the land on the map was mirrored for each player. Here, I focused on REXing above all else, to the detriment of my economy, and had 19 cities, while Dreylin, Haram, and TBS had 15, 15, and 14, respectively, but also managed to build some wonders, while I had none. On the other hand, Fennbandit had 15 cities as well. They had no wonders but were ahead of everyone else in tech at this point. Jowy also had good tech, but then tried and failed to invade a neighbor (TBS), and thus was behind. (Tsargon and Scipio got into an even earlier war and thus fell way behind)
So, 19 cities by T98. In PB27, the expansion rate was even faster due to early techs being a little cheaper, although city counts averaged around 13-15 before wars due to less land being available. In contrast, PB19 had much higher peaceful city counts, but was a little slower.
How faster does the "huge map play" of Civ3 allow one to hit 15-20 cities? I can't imagine that it could be too much faster without being completely mindless ICS. (and tbh, that's sorta what my memory of Civ3 is, although it's been about a dozen years since I've played it regularly)
P29, as most games on RB, functions with a more lush map than the generator gives, which skews perception.
Still, I do think the level to which Civ4 penalizes expansion is being overstated, here. And I think that's because that level is so heavily tied to player difficulty (and, to a lesser extent, map size). So the expansion Joey talks about (which, remember, is with a lush map, occurs after a bunch of rejigging values was done for the expansions, and follows years of optimization in gameplay) is disingenuous, but so is the penalization Sirian talks about, which presumably draws upon high-level SP play (on standard maps) of the game as it came out of the box.
Ultimately, there are a bunch of different ways to consider this. Do we take the perspective of most SP players, who won't go past Noble (and thus expansions cost is trivial), most MP players from GS, who played on Noble (iirc), or modern RB, which generally hits Monarch or Emperor (with the earlier caveats)?
Or are we talking about early RB, high level SP play which most of us started out on? Or the modern T-hawkian contests?
And there are a dozen over scenarios that spring to mind. Each of which will lie at a different point on the spectrum, both in terms of how much expansion actually costs, and how the player playing experiences/views that expansion.
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
(I do agree though that, whatever way you play, there is a level at which the cap completely flies off. That existed in the base, and has got worse with expansions.)
Erebus in the Balance - a FFH Modmod based around balancing and polishing FFH for streamlined competitive play.
(May 23rd, 2016, 23:27)GermanJoey Wrote: How faster does the "huge map play" of Civ3 allow one to hit 15-20 cities? I can't imagine that it could be too much faster without being completely mindless ICS. (and tbh, that's sorta what my memory of Civ3 is, although it's been about a dozen years since I've played it regularly)
Civ III expansion is vastly faster than Civ IV's. Settlers only cost 2 pop (easily regrown) and 30 shields. The typical early game sees the player build a granary ASAP in a number of cities established as "settler pumps", which then produce almost nothing but settlers (with the occasional worker tossed in) until all available land is claimed. Culture takes a long time to produce unless you're a Religious civ (the cheapest culture-producing building is 60 shields), cities not immediately adjacent to lakes or rivers can't grow past size 6 without an expensive aqueduct only available at the end of the ancient era tech tree (and then cap at 12 until a much latter tech), and new expansions don't cost anything except potentially raising corruption by a small amount, so there's little reason not to pack them in everywhere.
It's not completely mindless, you still need to prioritize settling locations for at least the first few rings, but a lot of the gameplay consists of building an ever-advancing wall of settlers as quickly as possible, while relying on various tricks to keep the AI at bay from your paper military until you're ready to kick ass.
On the higher difficulty levels the AI plays like this too, with the exception of the "paper military" part. Landmasses get colonized quickly in III.
