We have enough on our hands

[Kronoz]

Hi,

(...)

I hold some grudges with Firaxis for how they handled Civ IV post-release. (...)

-Kylearan

I agree with you here. For me CIV has an enormous potential to get me addicted to the degree that it could ruin my relationship and make my boss unhappy at work.....but it's just not there. Technical difficulties has ruined the game for me, to the point that fysical abuse in rage begins to take its tall on my keyboard. But I have not given up....if the patches wont fix my issues, I will upgrade my computer (a computer that is better than the "recommended specs" from the game-package).


....and to stay on the subject; I have no trouble beliving Atlas when he says the game will need rebalancing with the better AI mod. In my opinion, the AI is notably better in Warlords even without the mod. Difficulty levels will not translate between warlords and vanilla without a rebalancing.

Soooo: which are the pointless traits in warlords? Protective and...?

[Sullla]

I hold some grudges with Firaxis for how they handled Civ IV post-release. If they actually do another patch including the Better AI mod (or some aspects of it) in a tested, balanced way, a lot of faith into them will be restored with me, and I will buy Warlords.

As usual, Kylearan did a good job of summing up what a lot of us are thinking. If there's another patch coming for Warlords, it would be news to me. I wouldn't lose sleep waiting on it. Ever since Firaxis took Soren off of Civ4 (and that was roughly January 2006), their post-release support has been extremely sketchy. NOTHING like the wonderful efforts we saw back in Civ3, when regular patches continued to improve things for almost a full year after release. Warlords did some things right, some things wrong - but the failure to support the expansion with anything beyond one "mega-patch" does not reflect well on the developer. There are significant parts of the game that need rebalancing now that Blake has substantially improved the AI, but no work is being done by Firaxis in that area, and we're going to end up with a muddled final version of Warlords. Blah.

It's clear that Firaxis is writing off Civ4 at this point as anything beyond a cash cow that they can continue to milk for more money (have they set a release date for that inevitable second expansion yet?) The change from when I was doing pre-release work in 2005 is so enormous it's almost laughable. You won't hear me singing their praises online right now. It is... most disappointing to see Civ4 heading down the road of Civ3 Conquests (endless feature creep and "cool stuff") after all the work we put into balancing the original game.

Of course, Civ4 is still a fun game, so it's not the end of the world. Soren's current project should be announced soon, and due out sometime late 2007/early 2008. For those getting tired of Civ4, there are tons of other good games out there to try. I'm having some fun with Master of Orion, for example, which I missed the last time around.

[Atlas]

Difficulty levels will not translate between warlords and vanilla without a rebalancing.

This is part of the problem. The other part is the advantage the AI gets are huge when coupled with the better execution by AI. I was toying around the other day in a game where I was teamed with the AI (makes it easy to monitor the AI while still playing and having fun). My teammate had a pretty food heavy city... so he whipped the Heroic Epic and then starting slaving units out of that city it was so sweet. Meanwhile I am at war with Mao and am trying to choke him, BUT he is rebuilding improvements as I pillage them b/c now workers know that if I have axes and spears as a choke then they are safe as long as they are 2 tiles away. There are just a myriad of tweaks that make the AI play alot better.

Soooo: which are the pointless traits in warlords? Protective and...?

I have to say that I don't really like ANY of the new traits. Charismatic blah; Protective, who needs it; Imperialistic, no thanks. I would rather have any combination of the old traits than these. What is odd is that I rather like some of the ideas incorporated into these traits -25% XP needed for unit promotions for example, but I would have prefered a tacking on of these abilities to the old traits and the creation of new traits. The exceptions are the decreased settler and worker costs for Imperialistic and Expansionist- these are the most important units of the game and should represent and identical investment of resources for all civs.

[Atlas]

It is... most disappointing to see Civ4 heading down the road of Civ3 Conquests (endless feature creep and "cool stuff") after all the work we put into balancing the original game.

This would be terrible. Conquests' changes were huge vis-a-vis balance, Statue of Zeus anyone? Of course it was evident in the original release of Civ4 that there would expansions to follow, I mean The Great Wall was left out as a wonder. I would like to think that once the new expansion comes out everything will be alright, but we already tried that... so (IMHO) the time is coming to make an RB mod for Vanilla that eliminates the whipping bug and introduces the Warlord's Chariot advantage v. Axemen.

[dathon]

Hi Sullla,

I just read through your reports on MOO on your site. Nice to see you getting in on this classic! Think we might see you on a succession game roster in the near future?

dathon

[Sullla]

Quite possibly, although it will depend on how busy I am with work. I've read through just about all of the Orion Succession Games at one point in time or another, and although I don't think MOO is as well-suited to SG play as the Civ games, it still looks like fun.

More importantly, now that I have several Impossible wins under my belt, I've moved out of the realm of clueless n00b and can actually contribute to a team effort. We'll see what happens.



Would be nice to see some RBCiv activity at some point too...

[Raven_Lore]

This is lol Way.... off topic lol

[dathon]

Tell ya what, I'll make deal with you. You've never done an SG-MOO games, and I've never participated in an SG-Civ game, though I've followed several from Civ3 and 4. As long as it isn't Warlords, I'll jump into a CIV SG, and you jump into a MOO SG. Sound good?

[Sullla]

Tell ya what, I'll make deal with you. You've never done an SG-MOO games, and I've never participated in an SG-Civ game, though I've followed several from Civ3 and 4. As long as it isn't Warlords, I'll jump into a CIV SG, and you jump into a MOO SG. Sound good?

OK, sounds like a deal. As if I could say no to my good friend Red_RidingHood!



That's Dathon on the right with the voodoo mask, next to my own fashionable Viking hat.

[dathon]

Ahhh, the infamous Act 5 ice caverns in hell. Home of many a lethal gloam boss, and the infamous 42-second lag night Now I'm going to have to pop over to your site to re-read and remember the good times 8)

I'll be watching the forums here, and when a CIV game pops up that I think I can handle, I'll jump in. Hopefully, we'll be able to team up again for that! I haven't played CIV in several months, but when I left off, I was beating Prince regularly, and IIRC, I'm 2-1 on Monarch. For some reason, I got bored with CIV games WAY more often and quicker than Civ 3. I'd get to a certain point in the game, and just couldn't muster the will to continue. I'm hoping the shorter pace of SG's will keep my interest.

dathon