Civ 6 Release and Update Discussion Thread

[fluffyflyingpig]

We know the testing for five was miles worse than the testing for four, coming from the fact that they hired fanboys rather than those willing to break the game and find the problems.

You use the words "know" and "fact" incorrectly. Try these instead: "suppose" and "conjecture".

The pre-release testers on five all contributed to four. They were a smaller subset, minus the MP ladder folks and some of the single player testers.

You could, I suppose, go with the conjecture that half the Civ4 contributors were fanboys, and that Jon found a way to exclude the "good" testers from Civ4 and bring along only the bad ones to Civ5, but then how did Civ4 turn out so well with a half-bad testing group?


If you do want to label the Civ5 testers as fanboys, I suppose you'd have to put me at the top of that list. Soren doesn't view me that way, based on the fact that he's hired me to work with him again twice since he left Firaxis. First at Zynga, on a project that vanished when Zynga got in to financial trouble and closed a ton of the studios they had bought up. More recently at his own company, where I just finished designing a campaign upgrade for Offworld Trading Company.


I admit to contributing to suppositions and conjecture about Civ6. But I do try to label them as such. We have no idea what's taken place behind the scenes and who are the bad guys (if any) to explain how the game has shipped with the problems that we can see in it. Tossing around suppositions and conjecture as if they were facts is the kind of thing I tend to associate with fanboys -- and we don't have any of those around here? Right?


- Sirian

The testers name's were in the credits. One could find out what kind of people they are by looking at Apolyton and WPC...well mostly WPC. Some guys also broke the NDA so he could use that to crush you too. WPC really doesn't deserve respect and you only worked on maps so I think Brain would be able to grind you down if he tries. There's no way to know why Jon picked Apolyton/WPC without him confessing but I suspect that he doesn't care about MP at all (or only FFA MP--also his new game doesn't have MP in it) so it didn't make sense to use duel-league CivPlayers anymore so he had to pick a new group and so picked the group he grew up with: Apolyton/WPC. That's just a guess though but what's not a guess is what WPC is like.

I remember reading through a thread on CFC where Sulla's review of the game (shortly after the Daring Deities RBSG) and Dale one of the more notable testers came on to the thread and made an attempt to thrash Sulla's reputation, simply because he was critical. It was obvious after a few posts that he hadn't even read the review and couldn't address the problems raised when directly put up to him. A few of us got angry with him when his attacks got too bad (he'd long gone past breaking the forum rules), but he didn't get banned or even upbraided.

If that's the level of the testers in public (defensive attitude and offensive behaviour), and there's no indication that Dale was atypical, I can guarantee you that the testing process for five wasn't worth a shit.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/dr...od.391880/

Hahahahaha. And this Dale guy was a significant playtestdr?

[Magil]

I remember reading through a thread on CFC where Sulla's review of the game (shortly after the Daring Deities RBSG) and Dale one of the more notable testers came on to the thread and made an attempt to thrash Sulla's reputation, simply because he was critical. It was obvious after a few posts that he hadn't even read the review and couldn't address the problems raised when directly put up to him. A few of us got angry with him when his attacks got too bad (he'd long gone past breaking the forum rules), but he didn't get banned or even upbraided.

If that's the level of the testers in public (defensive attitude and offensive behaviour), and there's no indication that Dale was atypical, I can guarantee you that the testing process for five wasn't worth a shit.

Judging the entire testing team and process based on the actions of one particular poster and the forums they might browse seems awfully petty, not to mention a huge stretch. It's a reasonable thing to question their design decisions based on the product they put out, but it seems like you're going way too far in assuming so much about the testing process.

And then there are the borderline nonsensical claims of "no testing"... I mean, really, I was surprised about the reaction to the God of the Forge bug I posted earlier. I could probably name similar bugs/exploits that still exist in games that are five+ years old and are still perfectly good games, and I personally know that I have found mods that fixed some of them while official patches never did... that kind of thing hardly bothers me in today's age of gaming. Hell, Final Fantasy 6 is highly regarded but is riddled with glitches and "exploits".

[Thespian]

FWIW, someone on Civfanatics did identify the bug that makes classical/ancient era units always build faster (which I believe contributes to them being spammed en masse). It seems the God of the Forge pantheon is incorrectly applying to all Civs rather than just the cities with the pantheon present. There's already a fix for it here.

Huh, that's nice to know. That could very well explain the slightly terrifying number in the domination score. It wouldn't matter that much for a player - the units in that era are cheap with the correct policies, but for the AI who probably doesn't use the government systems well?

Either way, judging a game and its testers by something like this is awfully harsh. It's a much better product then Civ V in my mind and for that I feel credits are due. Issues like these are to be expected in any large enough game.

[Ituralde]

After reading through the whole thing I found your first impressions quite insightful and they mirror some of the gripes I have found in the game. And while this doesn't invalidate the UI criticism, I have heard it here several times, that the - for a better word - "City screen" does not show you

a) How many hammers you have put into a certain item.
b) How much food is put into Growth

That information is right there, when you change production on the top right and when you go into the City Summary screen on the left hand side.



So while it may not be obvious to find, the information you are looking for is still there.

[Ranamar]

A little mechanical thing... maybe this should go in the civilopedia thread.

It appears that the way the worship building bonus for Arabia works is that you get +10% science/culture/faith/gold in every city following your religion after building one of the worship building anywhere.

That is to say, if you have built the worship building (which is super cheap), the 10% bonus gets added to the basic believer effects of the religion.

Someone confirm that I am or am not crazy, please.

[fluffyflyingpig]

The game is stable, they did a good job there.

There are some bugs and poorly tested exploitative things, there's no sense that this was designed or balanced for multiplayer. Generally the bugs are not intrusive for single player.

Bugs are not really anyone's biggest gripe with the game.

The UI is puzzlingly a step back from iv and v. A massive number of small details are missing, unintuitive, poorly designed, or actively trying to hide information. Whoever did the ux design should be ashamed.

The AI performance is an absolute embarrassment. A default settings no-bonuses AI should not be stuck at one city 200 turns into the game. The AI is completely unable to play the tactical military side of the game and needs farcically large bonuses to compensate.



Theoretically both ui and AI could be fixed with patches, but the current state is a game that is not designed for multiplayer and that is a slog of a comp stomp on all but high difficulty levels. Maybe there are some interesting systems in the game. But the AI doesn't know how to use them and they sure as heck aren't tested for balance.

[fluffyflyingpig]

After reading through the whole thing I found your first impressions quite insightful and they mirror some of the gripes I have found in the game. And while this doesn't invalidate the UI criticism, I have heard it here several times, that the - for a better word - "City screen" does not show you

a) How many hammers you have put into a certain item.
b) How much food is put into Growth

That information is right there, when you change production on the top right and when you go into the City Summary screen on the left hand side.



So while it may not be obvious to find, the information you are looking for is still there.

It IS unclear exactly how much food is required to grow. Does Cairo need 9.2 food? Or 18.1 food?

[Magil]

The UI being this bad is pretty silly, yes. I think that's a much more pertinent complaint than a few bugs/exploits that got into the release. I am honestly baffled that Firaxis doesn't think we want to see that kind of information--it doesn't hurt anyone to have that info ready! And sortable lists are an excellent thing. Of course, even for IV I generally preferred to use BUG, V had EUI, and I expect VI's UI will be improved by modders as well.

FWIW, someone on Civfanatics did identify the bug that makes classical/ancient era units always build faster (which I believe contributes to them being spammed en masse). It seems the God of the Forge pantheon is incorrectly applying to all Civs rather than just the cities with the pantheon present. There's already a fix for it here.

Huh, that's nice to know. That could very well explain the slightly terrifying number in the domination score. It wouldn't matter that much for a player - the units in that era are cheap with the correct policies, but for the AI who probably doesn't use the government systems well?

Either way, judging a game and its testers by something like this is awfully harsh. It's a much better product then Civ V in my mind and for that I feel credits are due. Issues like these are to be expected in any large enough game.

That's part of it, but the AI also starts with a much larger number of free units on higher difficulty levels than we might be used to, up to 5(!) free warriors on deity.

[fluffyflyingpig]

If you knew how much more food you need you could shuffle tile assignments around to grow sooner!  Assuming you can see tile yields under the giant citizen icons.




Why don't you do that with production?  Well, bringing up the tile selection screen HIDES the city production menu, so you need manually do the subtraction yourself to calculate how many hammers you need, then write that number down because the menu disappears.

Also, note that the production menu cleverly hides the info blurb on the city screen telling you what the item you are building actually does.  And the city details menu covers up your current research so you can't see how many turns remain till research completes! 


Tronster Hartley, the UI you designed is bad and you should feel bad.

[Brian Shanahan]

Judging the entire testing team and process based on the actions of one particular poster and the forums they might browse seems awfully petty, not to mention a huge stretch. It's a reasonable thing to question their design decisions based on the product they put out, but it seems like you're going way too far in assuming so much about the testing process.

I'm not judging based on one tester. I am saying that Dale's attitude to valid criticism was typical of the testers who posted publicly, and therefore a concern as to whether the testing team was properly capable of actually sniffing out bugs in the game.

And that is an issue for Civ 6 as well, because the same kinds of bugs and imbalances and playstyle stupidities have looked to have been implemented in six as were abundantly evident in five. As I have said above, six seems have gone for the "ooh, shiny" design decisions in a lot of areas, following on from five rather than four's "what's the best choice to make the game good".