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Cobbsprite posted:Doomstacks are bad and worse than 1UPT by ... at least an order of magnitude. Possibly two or three. In multiplayer yeah. In single player the AI has no idea how to use them so they drag the game down. Doomstacks aren't great but at least the AI could understand them.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:04 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:11 |
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Cobbsprite posted:Doomstacks are bad and worse than 1UPT by ... at least an order of magnitude. Possibly two or three. Why?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:17 |
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One thing that has really niggled me is the existence of Civfanatics and the Community Balance Patch for Civ 5. Civ 5 BNW was a pretty good game and had a lot going for it. But, if you load up the CPB its night and day. Everything from the civ bonuses, to new units, to the unit leveling system, to city states, and so on and so on. Its a very different game, a far more complex game with a lot more granularity, for better or for worse. So, the CBP mod exists (Vox Populi) and the massive community surrounding it at civfanatics and other places. The designers at Firaxes have to know about this, right? When laying the groundwork for their newest game, they have to see what people like and dislike in the modding community and see the popularity of all the different mods and community choices out there. Since they can see the work thats already been done, my question then becomes-why aren't they coopting this? Why aren't they doubling down and building upon what the community has chosen for itself? Even the AI tweaks in the CBP are leaps and bounds above what came standard in Civ 6. Is there some kind of pride block that prohibits Firaxis from accepting their ideas? Do they not know what the communities are doing? Do they just not care? Granted, I really like Civ 6 and I consider it better than 5, but I don't know why there are so many gimmies left on the table. Like the AI tweaks for one, the religious bonuses, the vassalage system, the upgrade paths, the unique resources and so on. A lot of those things are pretty minor but were ignored. Whats up with that? There is an entire website dedicated to making their game better and they don't really pull from that pool for some reason.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:25 |
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Jastiger posted:Granted, I really like Civ 6 and I consider it better than 5, but I don't know why there are so many gimmies left on the table. Like the AI tweaks for one, the religious bonuses, the vassalage system, the upgrade paths, the unique resources and so on. A lot of those things are pretty minor but were ignored. Whats up with that? There is an entire website dedicated to making their game better and they don't really pull from that pool for some reason. I remember that they actually included some modded UI screens back in IV BTS. It concerned me when they did not do something similar in BNW.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:32 |
Fork of Unknown Origins posted:In multiplayer yeah. In single player the AI has no idea how to use them so they drag the game down. Doomstacks aren't great but at least the AI could understand them. Doomstacks aren't really a thing in multiplayer though, they're only a thing because that was the only way they could get the AI to be halfway competent, and the way they did it heavily encouraged the player to do it too. In mp you'll get all of your cities burned if you try only having one doomstack. Carpets of doom are way worse than stacks of doom if you ask me, and the way 1UPT is handled with civilian units and particularly religious units is a huge pain in the rear end. And 1UPT is probably why everything is so drat expensive in V and VI (though that's mostly districts I suppose).
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:31 |
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Cobbsprite posted:i have no idea how to build an empire or increase my production
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 08:57 |
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Naw, it's fair to bitch about just how bad the AI actually is. It is making very obvious mistakes that absolutely should have been picked up on in testing and fixed pre-release. I'm not asking for it to be perfect out of the gate or even really good, just for it to not make immediately obvious mistakes like unit cycling till death in battle, carpeting the map with obsolete units and not realizing most military units are actually military units. Just beat a game on Immortal and I agree. This was my first Civ game since Civ 4 and I couldn't believe how easy it was. I expected Firaxis to have improved their AI over the past 11 years since Civ 4 but I guess not. The entire game could be summarized as such: being attacked from all sides by every AI player in the game for basically no reason, effortlessly mowing down hordes of enemy archers and catapults with my handful of machine guns and artilleries and eventually winning the space race. I had a only six cities, but a shitload of gold and stuff thanks to the AI repeatedly begging for peace and offering their entire treasuries and luxury resources and great works. lovely AI players aside, after this game I realized I would kill for a "Fortify & Guard" option for ranged units (and also cities) that would make them automatically open fire on anyone who comes in range. Doing it manually every turn was extremely tedious to say the least and it was the reason the game took four days of real-life time. Occasionally I would forget (or just not notice a barbarian sneak in through the arctic border) and it would result in an improvement getting pillaged. Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Nov 7, 2016 |
# ? Nov 7, 2016 09:01 |
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enraged_camel posted:The entire game could be summarized as such: being attacked from all sides by every AI player in the game for basically no reason, effortlessly mowing down hordes of enemy archers and catapults with my handful of machine guns and artilleries and eventually winning the space race. I had a only six cities, but a shitload of gold and stuff thanks to the AI repeatedly begging for peace and offering their entire treasuries and luxury resources. This is what I hate the most. I can get over the AI not being able to manage 1UPT on hexes. That's a very complicated thing to program. But I can't stand that they won't accept peace under and circumstances, and then offer me their life savings and sister's maidenhood on the very next turn.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 09:05 |
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Cobbsprite posted:Getting really tired of this kind of whinging. Do you come from bizzaro world? Firaxis is one of the worst for updating their games on the go, all the fixes come in expansions like a year down the line. Paradox fixes their games month on month and that's what I expect. I never thought I'd be holding them up as paragons of the industry but that's what they've become in the last 5 or so years.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 09:38 |
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The Human Crouton posted:Some guy on civfanatics went through on day 1 and added tags to all of these units so the AI actually recognizes them for their proper role. At least that's what I understand of it. It's ridiculous just how quickly people are finding and fixing this lazy poo poo. Just wait and see how many of these easy fixes that wont be implemented in the first patch.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 09:40 |
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Sounds like you guys just need to stop being so darn entitled.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 11:03 |
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enraged_camel posted:The entire game could be summarized as such: being attacked from all sides by every AI player in the game for basically no reason, effortlessly mowing down hordes of enemy archers and catapults with my handful of machine guns and artilleries and eventually winning the space race. I am really bad at this game. I was playing on a low difficulty yesterday, trying real hard to win scientifically, and I failed by about sixteen turns. You've got to have multiple spaceports up and running before turn 400, don't you?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 11:21 |
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Jastiger posted:One thing that has really niggled me is the existence of Civfanatics and the Community Balance Patch for Civ 5. Civ 5 BNW was a pretty good game and had a lot going for it. But, if you load up the CPB its night and day. Everything from the civ bonuses, to new units, to the unit leveling system, to city states, and so on and so on. Its a very different game, a far more complex game with a lot more granularity, for better or for worse. Maybe they see this, maybe they don't - nobody knows what the gently caress goes in Firaxis's heads. The company is really notable for having an extremely ivory-tower mentality, they still only ever communicate with customers by way of the gaming media, through carefully vetted interviews and press releases. They don't seem to have caught up at all to the way PR works in the internet age; they do zero outreach and I don't think they even hire community managers. There's a thriving community around each of their games (well, except Civ BE) and they refuse to capitalize on that at all, in fact, they completely isolate themselves from it. All releases, patches, plans etc. are kept a mystery under lock and key for as long as feasible. There are no channels at all to ask anyone in Firaxis a question and get an answer, except maybe tech support. It's baffling. I'm not saying they need to have Paradox levels of transparency, but at least maybe acknowledge an issue once in a while. Nobody in the gaming industry works like this anymore.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 11:48 |
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Cobbsprite posted:Doomstacks are bad and worse than 1UPT by ... at least an order of magnitude. Possibly two or three. in Civ4 you could actually lose a war, in civ5/6 you have to be retarded to even lose more then a unit, while wooping rear end on a force 4-5 times yours, no matter what difficulty
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 13:57 |
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Taear posted:Germany attacked me out of nowhere. They had 8 heavy chariots and four catapults. I was in the industrial age - the chariots were oneshotted by my city which fought them all off alone. India launched a large amphibious invasion of me with their UU elephants and catapults last night. It was at something like turn 300 and I had infantry and artillery, plus a force of Battleships and Ironclads in the sea they had to cross - they had a couple of Frigates that didn't even show up until their army was dead. The war did not go well for them. Cobbsprite posted:Getting really tired of this kind of whinging. What? Firaxis aren't that great at patching. Jastiger posted:Is there some kind of pride block that prohibits Firaxis from accepting their ideas? Do they not know what the communities are doing? Do they just not care? They seemed interested with working with the Long war people for Xcom2, at least a bit for day1 mods. It could also be that despite how popular stuff like the CBP is with Civfanatics etc. not a huge percentage of the playerbase actually uses it, so they worry about turning off the larger "casual" playerbase by making things more complicated.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 14:26 |
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Yeah, Firaxis are loving terrible at supporting their games.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 14:49 |
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They dont have to turn it into an anti casual experience if they are afraid of the civ fanatics people being just a minority of their player base. But come in, this community has done a ton to make the game more approachable. They just need to acknowledge community input. I guarantee civ 5 wouldnt have kept selling for so long without a community to keep it updated and active
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 14:58 |
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Gort posted:Yeah, Firaxis are loving terrible at supporting their games. There's a reason why one of the most common phrases amongst the XCOM community is "Fix your game, Jake." (Jake Solomon, creative lead and team "face") I will say that the XCOM AI is pretty good at positioning and does get better at higher difficulties. I wonder what the differences are that drag down the Civ AI- perhaps higher unit density?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 15:01 |
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Civ 5 AI even after BNW and all the patches is still absurdly stupid even in things that seems simple Like, in all my games I would usually get into wars late game when its already won and getting boring, and necessarily I would find that like half of my enemy's navy is comprised of carriers even if they barely have planes at all, all mpoving around empty doing gently caress all. They also have a thing for anti-air units and will spam tons of it and use it like regular infantry, sending then to be destroyed in attacking cities I get that moving units in 1UPT is hard for the AI, but choosing units should in a way that is effective and makes sense should not be that hard and would go long ways into making the AI better at war, and they never bothered to do it, in all this years
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 15:12 |
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You could easily "make the AI better" at 1 UPT by increasing the number of hexes on the map and speeding up units. The average unit having only 2 moves a turn really fucks things up.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 15:40 |
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Gort posted:You could easily "make the AI better" at 1 UPT by increasing the number of hexes on the map and speeding up units. The average unit having only 2 moves a turn really fucks things up. Would you have city districts take up more than one hex, or would they just be smaller?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 15:45 |
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its kinda interesting because firaxis does hire from the community. jon schafer was a big civ3 modder on cfc before he got hired for civ5, and the community manager at the time of civ5 release was also a cfc poster, developed a 3rd party website for civ4 mp support (and was also a goon)
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 15:46 |
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Gort posted:You could easily "make the AI better" at 1 UPT by increasing the number of hexes on the map and speeding up units. The average unit having only 2 moves a turn really fucks things up. The way the game deals with hills and forests too. You can see that the AI has problems with it if you stand a builder or settler next to a barbarian scout on a hill and how rarely they actually try and capture them. It's like they say "Well I have two moves so I'll step forward once and...oh."
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 16:08 |
Cobbsprite posted:Getting really tired of this kind of whinging. Source your quotes.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 16:17 |
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prefect posted:Would you have city districts take up more than one hex, or would they just be smaller? I'd actually go the opposite direction and divide every "city" hex into six "military unit" hexes. Boom, six times the hexes for the units to use, no effect on the economic game at all.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:06 |
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Gort posted:I'd actually go the opposite direction and divide every "city" hex into six "military unit" hexes. Boom, six times the hexes for the units to use, no effect on the economic game at all. If you've got a unit in one sub-hex, and the enemy has a unit in another sub-hex, and they pillage, does it destroy the whole hex for economic purposes?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:10 |
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prefect posted:If you've got a unit in one sub-hex, and the enemy has a unit in another sub-hex, and they pillage, does it destroy the whole hex for economic purposes? Can't get down and dirty with the pillaging unless you've cleared the entire hex
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:12 |
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Also, increasing map size (relative to units) and increasing unit speed to account for the more space available, renders melee units unable to control the battlefield around them unless you change the rules entirely. Basically you made the ranged units even more powerful.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:15 |
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prefect posted:I am really bad at this game. I was playing on a low difficulty yesterday, trying real hard to win scientifically, and I failed by about sixteen turns. You've got to have multiple spaceports up and running before turn 400, don't you? Yeah. Ideally three, but two can also work if your production is really good. I had two cities with 120-130 production, so each space module took only 20-25 turns to complete. I also snagged Carl Sagan, who gives like 3000 production towards a space module when you activate him.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:28 |
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Rexides posted:Also, increasing map size (relative to units) and increasing unit speed to account for the more space available, renders melee units unable to control the battlefield around them unless you change the rules entirely. Basically you made the ranged units even more powerful. True to life though.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:43 |
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I think they need to drastically reduce the melee strength of ranged units.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:47 |
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prefect posted:If you've got a unit in one sub-hex, and the enemy has a unit in another sub-hex, and they pillage, does it destroy the whole hex for economic purposes? Probably you'd have to pillage six times, one for each sub-hex. Units would be a lot faster, however, so you could probably do some balancing around that. Actually getting an AI that can move units around each other is much more important than pillage mechanics though.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:58 |
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enraged_camel posted:I think they need to drastically reduce the melee strength of ranged units. Agreed there. Also city bombardment should be less effective vs siege weapons.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:00 |
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Hmmm...increased unit upkeep costs combined with vastly increased movement speed within non-fogged territory maybe? It'd encourage less carpeting but would allow you to defend multiple fronts with a much smaller force
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:00 |
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Gort posted:Probably you'd have to pillage six times, one for each sub-hex. Units would be a lot faster, however, so you could probably do some balancing around that. Actually getting an AI that can move units around each other is much more important than pillage mechanics though. If you create "stacks" of units and increase their speed by 6, you could make pillaging expend movement (like it already does), thus cavalry could still pillage a full tile in a single turn, but they wouldn't be able to move afterward. Also allow civilian units to stack, especially of different types, and teams.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:04 |
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Powercrazy posted:If you create "stacks" of units and increase their speed by 6, you could make pillaging expend movement (like it already does), thus cavalry could still pillage a full tile in a single turn, but they wouldn't be able to move afterward. One would have to be very careful not to force the player not to move->pillage 6 times every time they want to pillage a tile. Some odd automation would be needed, which is a fair amount of effort for Also, it should be noted that a hex tile does not cleanly split into six sub-hexes. Six triangular segments would cleanly make six sections- but would we really want 6 units per big-tile? Three diamond-shaped subsections would probably suffice. In either case, though, movement becomes very strange with multiple tile shapes in use.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:18 |
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Zomborgon posted:One would have to be very careful not to force the player not to move->pillage 6 times every time they want to pillage a tile. Some odd automation would be needed, which is a fair amount of effort for
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:29 |
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All the wargame-lite stuff is pretty tiresome. Abstract it all out.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:32 |
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So then there's no way to have a team victory at all in any way? Because that's sorta poo poo.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 18:52 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:11 |
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Jastiger posted:
1) It's unlikely that they just don't care and more likely an issue of it just isn't worth the cost to make the same fixes and test them. If the community makes a mod they can just slap a sticker of use at your own risk and not be potentially liable for any resulting problems. Although to be fair most projects of that nature for any decent sized game will often have huge efforts by the team behind the mod or just the community at large to test it. Other times it could just be not worth it. Even big name mods like the CBP are only used by a small fraction of the total potential user base and if people are still going to play the game with or without the CPB it doesn't make a whole lot of business sense to reinvent the wheel in an official capacity. Yeah you might gain some good will from the community but that still has to be balanced with the resources required to make the change. 2) Sometimes leaving things broken (from a balance perspective) is an intentional decision. If you don't care about multiplayer then some people enjoy having options that make the game easier or harder beyond just a AI difficulty slider. 3) If the development team has found a sweet spot where everything works as designed, even if the underlying product is still riddled with bugs and balance issues, then why fix what isn't broken?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 19:30 |