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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Playing-to-win also means that diplomacy with the Civ5 AI was impossible, because the AI always hated you and wanted to see you suffer. Whereas in Civ4, when an AI offered to make a Declaration of Friendship with you, you knew it actually meant something. Civ4 politics generally stabilized into 2-3 power blocs where everyone in the bloc liked each other and hated everyone outside of it, while Civ5 politics is this stupid crab bucket thing where anyone who's apparently doing too well gets yanked down by everyone else. This is mostly because of the ridiculously over-the-top warmongering penalties though. Hopefully they realize that was dumb and tone it way down for Civ 6. "You took two cities from Alexander so I'm going to passionately hate your guts forever now, even though I've always hated Alexander and you've always been a bro to me" is stupid, stupid, loving stupid. Speaking of dumb here's a question that may be dumb: Would it really be impossibly difficult to do both, and give the player the choice as to whether he'd rather the AI civs play to win or play to be interesting?
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May 31, 2016 02:21
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Presumably the hardest difficulties would HAVE to activate "AI is playing to win" mode
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May 31, 2016 02:48
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Eric the Mauve posted:This is mostly because of the ridiculously over-the-top warmongering penalties though. Hopefully they realize that was dumb and tone it way down for Civ 6. "You took two cities from Alexander so I'm going to passionately hate your guts forever now, even though I've always hated Alexander and you've always been a bro to me" is stupid, stupid, loving stupid. Probably, but they couldn't directly call it that. Maybe they could make the normal mode simulation based, and then make a hard version called "Competitive" or something.
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May 31, 2016 02:58
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AI playing for fun leads to stuff like Isabella hating wrong religion people, but loving people who share her religion. Or converting another civilization to improve relations and become best friends. Same with ideology or whatever. They like can like you if you're doing what they like, and hate you if you're offending their values. Competitive AI doesn't care. Religion and ideology to a competitive AI is meaningless. You're all enemies in the end, and they're willing to work with anyone to bring down the leader. Competitive AI is boring. Playing Civ V by myself is lame, while Civ IV was fairly dynamic and fun. Honestly, I'd be a fan if fun trumped challenge in every aspect of the game, but it wouldn't really be Civ if it did that. Civ is a game by design and a storytelling device only as flavor. That's why splitting nations is out and things like city states have to be formalized. That's just the thing they're going for, and they're doing a good job at it from what I can tell. I guess what I really want is a loose ahistorical paradox game with fairly simple mechanics and a random map that starts at the rise of civilization, where countries pursue their own goals, rise and fall routinely, and overall everything is chaotic and directionless. Fortunately we have Steallaris which is close enough. So I'm fine with Civ VI being Civ, if it goes the hardcore game route, but I'll applaud every step it takes in the storytelling device direction.
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May 31, 2016 03:15
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Not necessarily- to use an easy example, ideologies in Civ V hated each other not just because of AI stuff but because they were in conflict with each other. You can invent mechanical reasons for the thematically sensible stuff to work.
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May 31, 2016 03:21
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StashAugustine posted:Not necessarily- to use an easy example, ideologies in Civ V hated each other not just because of AI stuff but because they were in conflict with each other. You can invent mechanical reasons for the thematically sensible stuff to work. Except they really weren't in conflict with each other. In principle I don't give a poo poo that my neighbor is Autocracy while I'm Freedom; the ideological hatred was just a clumsy attempt to patch in a source of conflict in the late game that worked roughly like Civ4's religions did. But by the lategame in Civ5 everyone hates you anyway, so it didn't make any difference to how the game played out.
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May 31, 2016 03:42
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Well yeah because Civ V was generally balanced like poo poo. But the idea was sound.
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May 31, 2016 03:46
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My only regret with Civ 5 and now Civ 6 is that none of them will have Fall from Heaven released...why Kael, why?
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May 31, 2016 03:53
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All the CIv 4 chat makes me wish my DVD drive worked so I could reinstall it. So tempting.
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May 31, 2016 03:56
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Jastiger posted:All the CIv 4 chat makes me wish my DVD drive worked so I could reinstall it. So tempting. There's always the upcoming steam sale!
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May 31, 2016 03:59
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For some reason I am hilariously bad at Civ 4. I've read up on the strategy and I still can't get past the medival era without getting boxed in, having an awful economy, losing a war badly, or some combination of the above.
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May 31, 2016 04:02
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Jastiger posted:All the CIv 4 chat makes me wish my DVD drive worked so I could reinstall it. So tempting. Yeah Civ 4 is stupid cheap during steam sales. I got it on Steam like 3 years ago for 5 dollars. StashAugustine posted:For some reason I am hilariously bad at Civ 4. I've read up on the strategy and I still can't get past the medival era without getting boxed in, having an awful economy, losing a war badly, or some combination of the above. At even Prince difficulty Civ 4 is a bitch to learn how to play right and the AI is pretty ruthless about wrecking you with a deathstack in the lateearly/earlymidgame. It's definitely the deepest game in the Civ series but accessibility is not one of its virtues. The learning curve is pretty steep. I think way back when Firaxis first announced Civ 5 would be basically a reboot of the series that was one of the first things they cited as to why. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 04:16 on May 31, 2016 |
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May 31, 2016 04:14
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yeah it just causes me to take 4d8 damage if I buy a game online that I already own on CD, ya know? Its why I don't have Age of Empires or Baldurs Gate updated versions.
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May 31, 2016 04:20
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Jastiger posted:yeah it just causes me to take 4d8 damage if I buy a game online that I already own on CD, ya know? Its why I don't have Age of Empires or Baldurs Gate updated versions. Don't be a wuss, make the will save.
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May 31, 2016 04:21
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Jastiger posted:yeah it just causes me to take 4d8 damage if I buy a game online that I already own on CD, ya know? Its why I don't have Age of Empires or Baldurs Gate updated versions. Tell you what, next Steam sale you buy me a $10 game (or $5 if it's that cheap) and I'll buy you Civ 4, would that improve your Redundancy Resistance enough to survive?
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May 31, 2016 04:23
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Jastiger posted:yeah it just causes me to take 4d8 damage if I buy a game online that I already own on CD, ya know? Its why I don't have Age of Empires or Baldurs Gate updated versions. Ha, if this came up a month ago I would have sent you the free copy of Civ IV I had in my inventory. I popped it when I got the sudden desire to play civ iv and couldn't find my disc, which I found later that week.
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May 31, 2016 04:33
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I could see a game like civ where empires are expected to fall in the middle of a game work if it were like SmallWorld/Vinci where you jumped into another country to try to score more points when your old one had run its course- that'd let you make the dynamics a lot more harsh and possibly untenable.
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May 31, 2016 04:35
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:Ha, if this came up a month ago I would have sent you the free copy of Civ IV I had in my inventory. I popped it when I got the sudden desire to play civ iv and couldn't find my disc, which I found later that week. User name and post combo crit on me.
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May 31, 2016 04:36
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Panzeh posted:I could see a game like civ where empires are expected to fall in the middle of a game work if it were like SmallWorld/Vinci where you jumped into another country to try to score more points when your old one had run its course- that'd let you make the dynamics a lot more harsh and possibly untenable. Yeah, if you were expected to lose your civ, especially multiple times, during a game, and the game were balanced around that, that'd be a different matter. Make it so the most stable civilizations still can't last more than a thousand years tops (which is IIRC about the max length of some of the longer-lasting Egyptian and Chinese dynasties) and even then they become stagnant and insular with time, so you want the barbarians to come in, shake things up, and get some new advances.
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May 31, 2016 04:52
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The Ryze and Fall mod did something like didn't it? Like, civs would get hit with almost insurmountable bullshit when they really did in history, and new civs popped up when they did irl. And iirc you could swap to control a budding civ as it spawned
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May 31, 2016 04:57
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Just fired up an emperor/continents game of civ4, because I'm hilariously rusty on it. Started next to Monty and Pacal. I gave in to Monty's first tribute demand, and so Monty declared war on Pacal. I rushed for macemen, and counterinvaded, taking all of Monty's and Pacal's cities. This was a long, grueling, grinding war, I didn't just build a handful of units, I had to keep building units non stop to deal with losses. The two of us had a broad front with one another, so I had to continuously scout out and keep an eye on other fronts so I didn't get counterinvaded. And in the end, the war was worth it, because in this game, land is power. My economy is a wreck, if someone invaded with a stack of rifles, I'd be toast, but if I can recover, I can easily win the game. This kind of dynamic play is what is missing from Civ5.
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May 31, 2016 04:59
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Serephina posted:Stellaris is the only Paradox game I've actually played, and it has outstanding internal politicking and fun narrative elements that are RNG based, but it is no Civ game. Civ should be Civ, it's a golden standard for the genre and shouldn't be hosed with. That's how other franchises died. I think a contributing reason why other franchises died is because they have to pay bills at the end of the day (big huge  ) whereas firaxis was secure after 2K acquired them. Civ has always introduced new mechanics or tried to implement them in different ways. It's straight-up embarrassing when Beyond Earth was completely overshadowed by a indie offering.TerryLennox posted:My only regret with Civ 5 and now Civ 6 is that none of them will have Fall from Heaven released...why Kael, why? Fallen Enchantress wasn't what I was looking for and none of the other stardock games strikes me as appealing. I'd gladly play a remake at this point, even if it means using 1UPT.
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May 31, 2016 05:06
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Phobophilia posted:And in the end, the war was worth it, because in this game, land is power. My economy is a wreck, if someone invaded with a stack of rifles, I'd be toast, but if I can recover, I can easily win the game. This kind of dynamic play is what is missing from Civ5. Yeah and in Civ 5 population is power, there's nothing at all to limit population growth within individual cities (only at the empire-wide scale), and the fewer cities you can cram your population into, the better. It was a pretty drastic change.
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May 31, 2016 05:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, if you were expected to lose your civ, especially multiple times, during a game, and the game were balanced around that, that'd be a different matter. Make it so the most stable civilizations still can't last more than a thousand years tops (which is IIRC about the max length of some of the longer-lasting Egyptian and Chinese dynasties) and even then they become stagnant and insular with time, so you want the barbarians to come in, shake things up, and get some new advances. There's a distant cousin of Europa Universalis called Great Invasions that has this exact design. It's set in 350-1066 and no political entity survived that time span (except Byzantium), so instead you play as a team of nations. Older countries stagnate and get torn apart as newer ones arise, so you keep switching around rather than eternal growth.
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May 31, 2016 06:02
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Catching up with the thread - empire splitting was in Civilisation II and was an interesting event except it got removed for rather obvious reasons. The trigger was on the capture of a large civilisation's capital if they didn't have enough money to immediately construct a new palace.
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May 31, 2016 06:29
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The board game Small World is pretty much designed around the idea that you'll almost certainly be abandoning your civ and picking a new one once after you've overextended/want a new powerhouse to play with. Not a mechanic that's ideal for Civ but it's meaty enough to essentially be a game of its own.
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May 31, 2016 07:30
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Delacroix posted:It's straight-up embarrassing when Beyond Earth was completely overshadowed by a indie offering. I hope you are not talking about Pandora, it was poo poo compared to BE. Speaking of BE, didn't they promise a revamped Diplomacy system with the expansion? I never got it because I didn't care for sea cities, but maybe Civ 6 diplomacy will expand on that? Ideally, in the Play to Be Interesting vs Play to Win AI debate, I think you can have the best of both worlds if the Civ 4 diplomacy variables for the AI were moved to each civ's population instead of the leader. For example, if Isabella would not declare war to a fellow Buddhist, it would not be because the AI script told her so, but because the AI didn't want to take a happiness penalty. This way you could also affect Human vs Human diplomacy. Give another player enough free gifts, and then see him being incapable of declaring war to you without triggering crippling unhappiness, because his people love you so much.
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May 31, 2016 10:07
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Rexides posted:Ideally, in the Play to Be Interesting vs Play to Win AI debate, I think you can have the best of both worlds if the Civ 4 diplomacy variables for the AI were moved to each civ's population instead of the leader. For example, if Isabella would not declare war to a fellow Buddhist, it would not be because the AI script told her so, but because the AI didn't want to take a happiness penalty. This way you could also affect Human vs Human diplomacy. Give another player enough free gifts, and then see him being incapable of declaring war to you without triggering crippling unhappiness, because his people love you so much. This is what luxury trades are supposed to achieve anyway, isn't it? Trade enough luxuries and you both become dependent on each other (perhaps one more than the other) for the happiness, and war becomes untenable. Also trade routes, but with gold. Trouble is, the AI gets happiness and gold crutches and so can afford to give the human player the finger. The "play to win" AI would abuse these crutches so they need to be carefully placed. I think the only crutch the AI truly needs is combat effectiveness because it's so poo poo at it.
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May 31, 2016 11:19
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Yeah, combat bonus crutch goes without saying.
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May 31, 2016 11:50
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Millennial Sexlord posted:The Ryze and Fall mod did something like didn't it? Like, civs would get hit with almost insurmountable bullshit when they really did in history, and new civs popped up when they did irl. And iirc you could swap to control a budding civ as it spawned 4 also has the Revolutions mod, where any nation could be split up (even single cities could rebel) if you do bad stuff (be dictator/king, expand too quick, have small army, lose war, have no trade, wrong religion etc), and afaik barabrian cities that were left alone could form new nations (i.e. if you start in the old world the new world turns civil if you take too long to settle it).
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May 31, 2016 14:26
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RevDCM was the best mod.
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May 31, 2016 17:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Except they really weren't in conflict with each other. In principle I don't give a poo poo that my neighbor is Autocracy while I'm Freedom i actually do when i play these games. in say alpha centauri i always went after miriam not because she was bellicose but because i hate antiscience fundamentalists. when i play the civ games i tend to fight or goad into fighting the historical figures i dislike most. Delacroix posted:I think a contributing reason why other franchises died is because they have to pay bills at the end of the day (big huge big huge died partly because they made a mediocre follow-up to one of, if not the best, rts ever and then were bought up by curt schilling and died with his lovely company.
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May 31, 2016 23:28
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Trouble is, the AI gets happiness and gold crutches and so can afford to give the human player the finger. The "play to win" AI would abuse these crutches so they need to be carefully placed. I think the only crutch the AI truly needs is combat effectiveness because it's so poo poo at it. The reason they need to give the AI crutches is because they didn't know how to make the AI smarter, at least not without slowing the game down to a grinding crawl. Whether you want a "play for fun" AI or a "play to win" AI or whatever else in between, the AI still has to know how to play the game.
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May 31, 2016 23:39
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Rexides posted:Speaking of BE, didn't they promise a revamped Diplomacy system with the expansion? I never got it because I didn't care for sea cities, but maybe Civ 6 diplomacy will expand on that? They did revamp diplomacy. You had different friendliness levels that you could pay influence to change, but only if you'd done enough things they liked (and those messages were constantly popping up as tweets that didn't pause the game: "I like your army," I hate your satellites," etc). Friendliness level determined how valuable trade deals were, and trade deals were also revamped to be passive empire-wide bonuses akin to social policies. The lowest friendliness level was war, so you could always tell it was coming long before the fighting started. I guess generally it fits into that "the AI roleplays their personality" thing, as opposed to the AI playing to win.
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May 31, 2016 23:43
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Clarste posted:They did revamp diplomacy. You had different friendliness levels that you could pay influence to change, but only if you'd done enough things they liked (and those messages were constantly popping up as tweets that didn't pause the game: "I like your army," I hate your satellites," etc). Friendliness level determined how valuable trade deals were, and trade deals were also revamped to be passive empire-wide bonuses akin to social policies. The lowest friendliness level was war, so you could always tell it was coming long before the fighting started. That's another thing - the smarter you can make the AIs, the more so you can have them do "roleplay" things rather than "play to win" things and still have it be competitive and/or relevant. If your AI is super incompetent (e.g. Civ5 AI at release) you need to make it pull every "play to win" trick it possibly can just so that it doesn't seem like there's crash-test-dummy piloting the civ.
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Jun 1, 2016 00:03
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If there's one thing to say about disposable workers, it means the AI won't work anywhere near as many unimproved tiles, meaning they can be more economically competitive even at middle difficulty levels like emp.
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Jun 1, 2016 01:32
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Phobophilia posted:If there's one thing to say about disposable workers, it means the AI won't work anywhere near as many unimproved tiles, meaning they can be more economically competitive even at middle difficulty levels like emp. How does that follow? They aren't using the existing unlimited workers effectively, so why would making the workers be more limited accomplish anything?
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Jun 1, 2016 01:43
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But right now, the AI isn't using unlimited workers, they have a higher worker:city ratio than the players, but they tend to be mismanaged, or out of position, or hiding in a city too scared of getting sniped. Now, you can basically have tile improvements on demand: a citizen working an unimproved tile means the AI will queue up a worker in a nearby city, and send it out. And because there is now a direct correlation between hammer output and tile improvements, the AI can actually take advantage of this with their handicap bonuses.
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Jun 1, 2016 01:48
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You're making statements without establishing causal linkages. In Civ5, workers are unlimited in the number of improvements they can create; in Civ6 they will be limited. Nothing in that says anything about how effectively the AI will use workers.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:03
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Rexides posted:I hope you are not talking about Pandora, it was poo poo compared to BE. No, I was referring to Endless Legend which came out a month before BE and was a much better 4x if not GotY. Influence points used to fund internal empire plans in lieu of policies and diplomacy was a good mechanic that made BE look like a copycat when they later added influence. Also the best one city challenge civilisation to date. 
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Jun 1, 2016 05:38
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