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Eric the Mauve posted:There used to be this thing where video game companies paid in-house employees to do extensive beta testing, and then they would fix various bugs before release. Wasn't Civ IV tested with a bunch of civfantatics posters for like a year before release for balance?
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Jun 22, 2016 17:51
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StashAugustine posted:Wasn't Civ IV tested with a bunch of civfantatics posters for like a year before release for balance? Kind of. I know one of the testers and he said what they fed back was ignored. Civ 4 was panned similarly to Civ 5 until it got its two expansions.
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Jun 22, 2016 21:21
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the funny part is that the expansion features were pretty garbage. the balance adjustments were great on the other hand.
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Jun 22, 2016 21:30
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The Human Crouton posted:Civilization 6 is going to be very good when it comes out, and great after the first balance patch. It has the advantage of many of its systems being tested for years in BNW and then written in from scratch instead of being forced into an existing engine. Agreed. Ed Beach delivered two great expansions for Civ 5 and he's been at the helm of this new game since its inception. I don't doubt the game will be better with expansions because that's how it always goes, but I really do think the base game this time is going to be the real deal. One reason in particular for feeling this way is that with BNW they were finally able to address perhaps the longest standing gameplay issue with the whole series, which was that the game felt over at some point during the medieval period and you were just going through the motions for the rest of the game. They haven't announced the return of ideologies and I suspect they probably won't come back, but I'm sure there will be other features that make the modern era more dynamic. At the very least, I expect tourism and diplomatic victories to be better integrated into the game from the start and have more satisfying payoffs in the late game. And if I'm going to wildly speculate based upon nothing more than tidbits of info from the Civ Analyst site, the fact that the 'final' science building (the Research Lab) comes with Chemistry, a relatively early tech in the history of civ games, and that the airport district seemingly has room for multiple buildings, I'd say the modern era is going to be longer and more important than in previous games. I also like how it appears that you have to build multiple projects in the space port district to win a science victory, and presumably that will enable the kind of counter play we haven't seen since I think the first game where you could take someone's capital to prevent their spaceship victory (in this case I'm expecting to be able to strategically bomb the space port to delay their progress).
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Jun 23, 2016 01:45
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The Diplomatic victory is gone anyway. We don't know exactly what is replacing it, but there's hints that it's some form of religious victory. Also Chemistry is probably a later tech than it was before, I think the narrator said 'Modern'.
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Jun 23, 2016 01:49
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I don't know, I think people ascribe way too much to process when I could just say Jon Shafer made some bad design decisions. His new game is interesting, though.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:03
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Panzeh posted:I don't know, I think people ascribe way too much to process when I could just say Jon Shafer made some bad design decisions. Jon Shafer got rid of stacks of doom, squares, and the slider. He is a hero.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:11
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The Human Crouton posted:Jon Shafer got rid of stacks of doom, squares, and the slider. He is a hero. I agree on everything except the Slider. More games should have sliders IMO
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Jun 23, 2016 03:58
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On the one hand, the slider was great for the way it helped organically produce failure states where your economy crashed and you were reduced to producing only tiny amounts of science because everything else was being spent on maintenance. On the other hand, the slider meant having this weird meta-resource (commerce) that I bet was unintuitive as hell for many players, considering how often you'd see people completely miss the point of why you would ever want to build a hamlet instead of, say, a windmill. Given that Civ5 was in part explicitly trying to simplify away from Civ4's complexity, I'm not surprised the slider went away.
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Jun 23, 2016 04:05
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The Human Crouton posted:Jon Shafer got rid of stacks of doom, squares, and the slider. He is a hero. There is nothing wrong with stacks of doom and the slider. Squares suck though, they can stay gone forever. Gort posted:Civ 4 was panned similarly to Civ 5 until it got its two expansions. I seriously, seriously doubt this. Super Jay Mann fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Jun 23, 2016 |
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Jun 23, 2016 08:00
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Civ 4 won multiple awards in 2005 before it got any expansions, going by wikipedia.
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Jun 23, 2016 08:08
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Civ 4 on release day was definitely crappy and had crashes and bugs, most notably the memory leak. My office tried to get several LAN and play by email games going on many different windows machines, and it was apparent that the client and pitboss needed fixing. I remember the gameplay itself as reasonably solid but in need of balances and tweaks. The Beyond the Sword version greatly outshines the unpatched, vanilla release install. Hardly surprising since it was years later. On the other hand, Civ 4 on release day was better than any version of Civ 3, which I don't think can be said of Civ 5.
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Jun 23, 2016 08:16
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http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ6_units.html "Starting in the Renaissance era two of the same unit can be combined into a Corps, which is less powerful than two individual units, but more survivable and takes up less space on the map (to reduce overcrowding). Later in the modern era, three units can combine to form an Army. The ability to form Corps and Armies are unlocked in the Civics tree rather than the technology tree." this is a reasonable compromise
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Jun 23, 2016 12:10
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Civ 4 won multiple awards in 2005 before it got any expansions, going by wikipedia. So did Civ 5, game awards have been sold to the highest bidder for a long time now (see also: SimShitty). I actually liked the sliders and miss them, I'm not a huge fan of the ultra-simplistic "food is everything because population drives everything, most notably science which is and will always be The Only Thing in Civ."
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Jun 23, 2016 12:41
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Sliders were ehh but science scaling off commerce rather than population was a good thing
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Jun 23, 2016 13:14
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Super Jay Mann posted:I seriously, seriously doubt this. Civ IV was a better game on release than Civ V was, but they both took expansions to get to their completed form.
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Jun 23, 2016 15:15
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The only sliders Civ needs is in a character customization menu. The world's next great leader shall be born in the monster factory!
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Jun 23, 2016 15:35
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Eric the Mauve posted:So did Civ 5, game awards have been sold to the highest bidder for a long time now (see also: SimShitty).
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Jun 23, 2016 15:40
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Are they going to have MadDjinn or whoever break the game over his knee two weeks prior to launch, though?
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Jun 23, 2016 15:54
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on the other hand, civ4 vanilla through to bts didn't have to perform civ5's ridiculous oscillations between infinite city sprawl and 4 city forever because its rules were compatible with gradual empire scaling into the endgame
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Jun 23, 2016 15:55
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Phobophilia posted:http://well-of-souls.com/civ/civ6_units.html I wonder what'll happen to the individual unit promotions when they assemble into Corps and Armies then? (assuming there are still unit promotions)
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Jun 23, 2016 17:03
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Phobophilia posted:on the other hand, civ4 vanilla through to bts didn't have to perform civ5's ridiculous oscillations between infinite city sprawl and 4 city forever because its rules were compatible with gradual empire scaling into the endgame I've always liked mods like Revolution for Civ4 that add a component of empire unity to the whole ICS problem. Want to sprawl and create/conquer a bunch of cities? Sure but good luck holding them! It allows historic events like the Mongols creating a vast empire and then breaking into smaller and smaller warring states or the Roman empire fracturing. I wish the baseline game incorporated this. Allow you to form/conquer as many cities as you want but make it hard in the early game to keep a large empire together with techs and governments making large empires cohesive. The penalty for overexpanding is a section of your empire breaking away and creating a new rival rather than your empire being suddenly unhappy. Although i'm wierd I've always looking at civ as more of empire role playing game than a strategy game with a goal with win and win quickly. Civ 4 was waaaay more roleplaying friendly than five especially with mods. For me Civ4 is still installed and I play every once in a while. Civ5 has been uninstalled for years. It was a better wargame sure but I couldn't get that sense of shifting national identities. Hopefully Civ6 bridges the game a little.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:04
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:Civ IV was a better game on release than Civ V was, but they both took expansions to get to their completed form. True, although I was referring to their reception at release. Incidentally, BTS and Civ4 Vanilla are pretty much the same game, just BTS has the balance adjustments and extra subsystems and extra content and such. BNW and Civ5 Vanilla have very little in common outside the core city/empire management design. Civ5 Vanilla feels like a terrible unfinished alpha which is more or less what it ended up being.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:19
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Xelkelvos posted:I wonder what'll happen to the individual unit promotions when they assemble into Corps and Armies then? (assuming there are still unit promotions) Maybe they'll apply promotions to the unit type itself this time around? For example, gain a few battles worth of xp with your archer and you get to pick a promotion to apply to every archer you own from then on, but they'll lose it once upgraded to composite bowmen or whatever is the civ VI equivalent. They'll have to reduce the xp requirement to gain a promotion significantly since they're only temporary but at least it makes more sense than your late game infantry being especially good because of the experience gained from beating up a few barbarians thousands of years ago.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:30
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Unpopular Opinion Alert: The game would be better without unit promotions.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:00
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How do you figure
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Jun 23, 2016 18:01
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Well, promotions were pretty dumb in Civ 5. The AI never got any because they would just suicide a carpet of units into you, while your units all became super-elite, with two no-retaliation attacks a round at range 3, making combat ridiculously easy. Oh, and experience gain didn't scale with game speed, so Marathon players had a billion promotions by the Ancient era, while Quick players got bugger-all. Promotions weren't necessarily the problem, but I'd take none over how they were implemented in Civ 5.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:09
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Jay Rust posted:How do you figure He's not wrong exactly, in that promotion grinding is dumb and stupid, and yeah, the idea that a unit is awesome because its ancestral unit from thousands of years ago did something cool is pretty silly. It gets really exacerbated in Civ5 because a) there's that stupidly strong "can attack twice in one turn" promotion (and also the promotion that allows you to attack units you can't see), and b) you can grind for unit experience by warring against a city-state, which is tedious but nearly risk-free. Here's my counterproposal: no promo grinding against city-states (their units count as barbarian units for purposes of experience, or whatever), and when you upgrade a unit, it loses all of its promotions and gets a "Historic Legacy" promotion instead, that just gives it +10% strength and doesn't help unlock any other promos. And it doesn't stack with repeated upgrades. So your unit is slightly more awesome because it has a storied legacy, but it still has to work to get all those special abilities.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:14
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I like the earlier idea of applying promotions across all units of one type rather than on individual units
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Jun 23, 2016 18:16
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The AI is poo poo at using unit promotions and they give the player a way to amplify the combat advantage he already has. On the other hand they give players an extra fun thing to fiddle around with, they help to represent the military advantage a nation gains with combat experience (though this could be done with civics), and they give an incentive for players to retreat units beyond the loss of hammers. I prefer them to be in because they are fun, but the Civ 5 implementation was awful. It seemed to me that the correct choice was always to bee line for Logistics and Range. There was vet little balance.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:16
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Here's my counterproposal: no promo grinding against city-states (their units count as barbarian units for purposes of experience, or whatever), and when you upgrade a unit, it loses all of its promotions and gets a "Historic Legacy" promotion instead, that just gives it +10% strength and doesn't help unlock any other promos. And it doesn't stack with repeated upgrades. So your unit is slightly more awesome because it has a storied legacy, but it still has to work to get all those special abilities. I love this idea  The AI should just get a few free +strength promotions, they don't know how to use anything else.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:20
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The problem, as always, is "Bad AI"
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Jun 23, 2016 18:23
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Jay Rust posted:The problem, as always, is "Bad AI" You can achieve "bad AI" in two ways though - by not putting enough resources into AI development, or by purposefully or neglectfully designing a game the AI can't be good at playing. For instance, if you make four starting choice trees - let's call them Liberty, Tradition, Honour and Piety - and one is good and the other three are poo poo, then "bad AI" is any AI you haven't told to just go Tradition every time. If you actually balance your game so that all four are valid choices, presto - you just made your AI a lot better.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:29
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And building off that, if the optimal strategy requires lots of fiddling around (like exploiting range 3 archers to their fullest) it disadvantages the AI again.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:33
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StashAugustine posted:And building off that, if the optimal strategy requires lots of fiddling around (like exploiting range 3 archers to their fullest) it disadvantages the AI again. Ideally the game is designed so that the optimal strategy for the player should require skill, but the optimal strategy for the AI can be handled by throwing numbers at it. AIs do big numbers well, players do skill well, if done properly, players are happy even though they're not "playing the same game" the AI is. In other words, AIs should cheat, but not so outrageously that the player feels the need to call them out on it. The problem with making a game that's just flat-out easy for the AI to cope with is that it then tends to be a game that humans also have little difficulty mastering, which means it's probably pretty shallow and uninteresting (Civ4 combat had this problem to some extent). And of course, if you make a game that's hard to write an AI for and you don't make the AI cheat (in the right way), then the player will trounce the AI...as happened in Civ5. I've played a modded Civ5 where the AI got extra promotions instead of the extra units it gets in base Civ5, and it went a long way to making warfare properly interesting instead of a turkey shoot.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:43
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Sometimes I wonder if making the AI "play the same game" as the human player is a trap with AI development being at the level it is. It might be more fun for the player if Genghis Khan just automatically spawned ten Keshiks and went crazy in the Medieval era rather than that being a possible outcome that doesn't happen most of the time. ----- I will say though, giving the AI better units rather than just hordes of them would go a long way to fixing Civ 5's AI. That, and making embarked units not so goddamn flimsy.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:06
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Individual unit promotions are dumb because they emphasize tactical combat in a strategic game, like many other elements in Civ 5 (strict 1UPT, ranged units, hard chokepoints).
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Jun 23, 2016 19:10
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Gort posted:Sometimes I wonder if making the AI "play the same game" as the human player is a trap with AI development being at the level it is. It absolutely is, especially in a game as complicated as Civ is. The problem with Civ5's AI isn't so much that it cheats, but that it does it ineptly and blatantly. When you see an AI city with no developed tiles somehow still popping out millions of units and producing implausible amounts of science, you know something fucky is going on.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:13
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I'd like to see Inquisitors reduce the population of a city by 1 when you use them. But - you can use them in enemy cities with the same majority religion as the Inquisitor.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:17
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Fister Roboto posted:Individual unit promotions are dumb because they emphasize tactical combat in a strategic game, like many other elements in Civ 5 (strict 1UPT, ranged units, hard chokepoints). 1 UPT wouldn't be so bad if they actually enforced it. Instead we get cities that can only have a single archer in them. Unless it's coastal, then there's a ranged boat in there as well, and it's twice as hard to take. And then the air units arrive and it has a doomstack of ten bombers in it and the game implodes.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:17
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