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Eric the Mauve posted:Yeah but in this case that's not buggy behavior in Civ 5 and 6, it's working as intended. You're not supposed to go to war with anyone unless you're prepared to go to war with everyone. Except, y'know, for the part where they declare joint wars all the gorram time even on Settler.
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Oct 15, 2017 03:56
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why the poo poo is France's army so overpowered?  I took Hattusa briefly but she is ripping through my units. The Garde is 92 strength! Why is her crossbowman on par with my field cannon? e: oh wait I see it is a corps? gently caress that. gently caress france
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Oct 15, 2017 21:08
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Defenestration posted:why the poo poo is France's army so overpowered? because you didn't kill them in the stone age while you had the chance
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Oct 15, 2017 21:17
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Also beware that she has an Knight army and an army of whatever her unique unit is called. The AI is pretty crappy as we all know but they do usually take the time to make corps and armies which is nice.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:17
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homullus posted:I think you haven't thought this through. Why do you think they don't have Stalin as a leader of Russia anymore, or Hitler of Germany, even as AI opponents, if not that it is (and therefore would appear) incredibly insensitive to massive amounts of human suffering due to genocide? Because publishers don't want to alienate any particular market. Zero other reasons.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:32
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Trivia posted:The real annoying thing is that the devs won't ever release an API for the old games, so making super-awesome mods that could potentially fix some of these issues will never be a thing. Additionally, they don't want to allow too much access for modding the game because it will cut into DLC sales.
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Oct 15, 2017 21:34
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The White Dragon posted:because you didn't kill them in the stone age while you had the chance I was killing sumeria in the stone age
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Oct 15, 2017 22:00
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The Garde Imperiale would be decent units except for some bizarre reason some unique units can be upgraded from past units while others can't. As a result, you have to either spend thousands of gold to get an army of them or slowly build them. Did the spy buffs help to make France a not-completely-terrible civ?
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Oct 15, 2017 22:41
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:Additionally, they don't want to allow too much access for modding the game because it will cut into DLC sales. I've seen this mentioned before but I've never been convinced it's the main reason there isn't better mod support. To use an example from the same company, XCOM:EU had virtually no mod support and yet a very popular mod (Long War) was developed and by all accounts drove a lot of sales (Firaxis even commissioned them to write a few 'official' mods for the sequel). When XCOM 2 was being developed, Jake Solomon mentioned that building in better mod support was a primary goal and it required a huge effort from the ground up. Civ 6's engine was created from scratch (it's not just an updated Civ 5) but building in mod support and, more importantly, releasing tools which can be used by non-developers takes major dev time and I believe that's generally why it isn't done. If anything, I suspect the calculus shows that the extra dev time required isn't worth however many extra sales it might generate (perhaps unless there's a proven player like Long War) but most of the time when devs get asked these questions they usually say they wish their game could support modding. To pick another (much older) example, the original DOTA sold an enormous amount of Warcraft 3 boxes, but to this day Blizzard still doesn't build mod support into their games (to be fair, their RTSes and Diablo games are the only ones where it would even make sense). I think it's probably partly because Blizzard is the kind of studio that prefers to be the sole curator of anyone's play experience, but again I suspect the main reason is that it takes a huge amount of resources to support modding with how complex most assets are these days. Still, in post-release interviews they did often say they wished they could have provided better mod support for Starcraft 2. And finally, I've never understood how anyone could think that CivFanUser#330's custom Lithuania civ with Google image searched leader shots and ludicrously overpowered traits is somehow impacting the sales of a civ with Firaxis assets and Sean Bean, but maybe that's just me.
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Oct 15, 2017 22:54
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Taear posted:There's a reason why "Building tall" and "building wide" are phrases. It's because of the devil, iirc
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Oct 15, 2017 23:24
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I played Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri like crazy when they came out but only briefly tried the games since then. I don't think I've ever even played V or VI for myself. A friend of mine who doesn't really play games anymore told me he has been playing Civ 2 again from nostalgia and is enjoying it. It got me thinking about trying whatever the latest version is but reading online there seems to be a lot of grumbling about Civ 6. If anyone is going to play just one Civilization game, what should it be? Is it simply a case of the newest is the best, or is Civ IV the peak of the series? Whatever the consensus is, me and my non gaming friend will embark on playing it.
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Oct 15, 2017 23:39
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Kalko posted:And finally, I've never understood how anyone could think that CivFanUser#330's custom Lithuania civ with Google image searched leader shots and ludicrously overpowered traits is somehow impacting the sales of a civ with Firaxis assets and Sean Bean, but maybe that's just me. Just because WE know that doesn't mean the clueless executive at 2K who ends up making the budgeting decisions knows that. EDIT: Like, I assume at some point, Firaxis submits a budget with the extra resources for modding and one without....
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Oct 15, 2017 23:41
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Konsek posted:I played Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri like crazy when they came out but only briefly tried the games since then. I don't think I've ever even played V or VI for myself. A friend of mine who doesn't really play games anymore told me he has been playing Civ 2 again from nostalgia and is enjoying it. It got me thinking about trying whatever the latest version is but reading online there seems to be a lot of grumbling about Civ 6. If you're only going to play one, IV or V (with all expansions).
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Oct 16, 2017 00:02
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Konsek posted:I played Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri like crazy when they came out but only briefly tried the games since then. I don't think I've ever even played V or VI for myself. A friend of mine who doesn't really play games anymore told me he has been playing Civ 2 again from nostalgia and is enjoying it. It got me thinking about trying whatever the latest version is but reading online there seems to be a lot of grumbling about Civ 6. Unless you're super duper into playing peacefully, it's Civ 4. If you want your game to resemble Civ 2, it's Civ 4. Civ 2 itself still holds up, actually, if you can get it running on a modern machine and can live with the prehistoric UI. (I still play Civ 1 on DOSBox occasionally and it's still fun.) If you ARE super duper into playing peacefully, Civ 6 is better than Civ 5 but also a lot buggier so it's up to you. If you go with Civ 4 buying from GOG rather than Steam is highly recommended because eventually you will want to install mods and some of the more comprehensive mods do not play nice with Steam.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:06
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Seems to me that modding would sell more copies. It's been that way for KSP and Skyrim I"m sure.
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Oct 16, 2017 00:31
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Konsek posted:I played Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri like crazy when they came out but only briefly tried the games since then. I don't think I've ever even played V or VI for myself. A friend of mine who doesn't really play games anymore told me he has been playing Civ 2 again from nostalgia and is enjoying it. It got me thinking about trying whatever the latest version is but reading online there seems to be a lot of grumbling about Civ 6. I've played every Civ on release (except Civ 3) and for me the newest is always the best. Or at least, once I start playing a new Civ I can't go back to the old one. If you've never played the most recent ones I would recommend Civ 5 with its two expansions and I would say it's a much better game than Civ 4. If you're not intending to play on a high difficulty then some of what I'm going to say next probably won't be relevant to you, but I'm going to touch on a few things mentioned over the last few pages with regards to the last few Civ games. I have a lot of fond memories of Civ 4 but for all the declarations here and on the Civfanatics forums about it being 'peak Civ' I find it very hard to look past its flaws after seeing how the later games addressed them. Chief among them would be how the game was essentially 'solved' in that you had a rigid build order which you had to abide by every game and almost every decision you had to make was pre-determined. It was a great game if you didn't want to engage its systems any differently to the last 50 times you played; the sliders were pointless because there was only one valid option (full science), diplomacy was locked by religion, and warfare basically amounted to moving a single stack of units around the map because to do otherwise ended in defeat. Also some of its features had the least compelling implementation I've ever seen in a game. Corporations, anyone? Civ 5 introduced leader and civ traits which were actually unique (as opposed to Civ 4's combination of fixed traits which resulted in leaders either being terrible or acceptable to play, with no in between) and the full screen leader portraits. Some civs were still terrible and others overpowered, but those unique traits, along with a few other systems like natural wonders, represented the first steps towards trying to break the static early game from Civ 4 (and Civ 6 would later double down on this concept). I feel like the motivation behind the full screen portraits was to showcase that these civs were now unique and that they had personality, and it was probably also an attempt to move the game away from the raw numbers aesthetic of Civ 4 and more towards the historical narrative experience which has always been at the heart of the franchise (my Spearman killed a Tank!) From a mechanical point of view, breaking your attention away from the map every now and then is probably a good thing, though I have to admit they haven't struck a good balance between welcome break and nagging. Maybe a system which let them contact you for trade deals and other minor issues on the main map while saving the full screen for important poo poo like declaring war would be a good compromise. Civ 5 also introduced one unit per tile, a topic which has probably had more words expended on it than any other in the franchise's history so I won't say much about it except that I feel like it's an improvement on stacks of doom but still flawed. The Civ 5 unit and board mechanics aren't deep enough for it to feel as rewarding as it can be in, say, a proper wargame, and they haven't solved the traffic jam issues when you fill the board with units. Civ 6 iterated on this but it's still a work in progress. At the risk of introducing the idea of praise for the devs into this thread, I'm going to say that Ed Beach is the best thing that's ever happened to the Civ franchise. Apart from the features and design direction he took the game in, which I'll get to, I'm going to lay the blame for one element that doesn't get talked about much squarely at his feet because of my passing familiarity with his board game work, and that is names. The names of the pantheons and other beliefs, the ideological tenets in BNW, and especially the policy cards in Civ 6. 'Divine Spark', 'Corvee', or 'New Deal' are highly evocative when you consider how they translate into game mechanics, and the language used for all of these things strengthens the core theme of the game and the franchise as a whole, which is history. It's something I really appreciate in Civ 5 and 6. The last thing I will say in support of Civ 5 is how the ideological bloc mechanics alleviated one of the biggest problems with every Civ up until that point, which is the monotony of the endgame. Once you get to a certain point (usually the Renaissance or equivalent) you know you're going to win and it's just a matter of waiting it out by repeatedly clicking the end turn button. In BNW, though, there comes a point around the modern era when each civ has to choose an ideology and suddenly new threats can emerge to shake up the late game. It doesn't feel as forced as the relationship between religion and diplomacy in Civ 4 even if that's essentially what it is (there are three different ideologies and civs with the same or different ones become mutual friends or enemies). This is the BNW system I miss most in Civ 6 even if it wasn't perfectly implemented, and I would put money on something like it appearing in the first expansion. So in Civ 6 one of their core design principles was to solve the static early game problem I mentioned earlier. Early boosts and inspirations, pantheons and districts and your unique civ bonuses all depending to some extent upon terrain, all of these things are designed so that each game begins and plays differently. It's not a perfect system, of course, but moreso than in any previous Civ there isn't an optimal path through the game. The agenda system is also designed with this in mind. You're supposed to encounter civs which will be harder to befriend and some which will be easier, again in service of the idea that each game presents different challenges and requires a different strategy. With regards to all the warmongering penalty complaints, I feel like the diplomacy system in Civ 6 is a natural progression from past games when you could screw the AI with constant declarations of war followed by truces followed by broken peace treaties and more war, all without repercussion. Being able to neatly conquer one civ after another was very gamey and honestly pretty lame. The current system is a lot more engaging but it definitely needs more polish, especially on the UI front. There are actually a lot of actions you can take to solidify friendships and counteract warmongering penalties, but I admit sometimes they feel like they're not worth the reward (do I avoid spending gold because Japan likes Mr Moneybags this game?) and most of the time it's just a pain to navigate the diplomacy UI and info screens to even see your options. In that regard I can understand why people want to default to war all the time, but if you've decided before you begin the game that you want to win by conquering the world and you immediately start out trying to kill the civs who are inclined to be your friend, well, it's going to be harder. I do wish there were other ways to influence the world apart from war and culture. I would love to see a pollution system like in Civ 2 make a return, where you can potentially face the consequences of climate change and worldwide terrain destruction in the modern era (and I'd love to see 'global warming' as a casus belli). By the same token, the world council system from Alpha Centauri where you could actually propose geoengineering initiatives to raise or lower the sea level (and force them through if you had the diplomatic clout, ie. if you were Lal) is my favorite implementation of that feature in a Firaxis game, though I think the only competition is the one in BNW. My biggest complaint with the franchise which still hasn't been solved is how science dictates the pace of the game. I play on epic in Civ 5 and 6 and it still feels like the eras pass by way too quickly to appreciate them. I'd love to have a protracted medieval war, say, but most of the time as soon as you've built an army one of your opponents is fielding muskets or even rifles. If they could find a way to hit the brakes on technological advancement while still providing challenging gameplay, that would be peak Civ for me.
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Oct 16, 2017 06:51
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Kalko posted:With regards to all the warmongering penalty complaints, I feel like the diplomacy system in Civ 6 is a natural progression from past games when you could screw the AI with constant declarations of war followed by truces followed by broken peace treaties and more war, all without repercussion. to clarify you can still do this, and i love doing this. as long as a civ hasn't met you yet, they don't recognize you as a warmonger. even in civ 6! it'll still get mad at you for having a city though. they should probably stop developing AIs that do that, it's just astronomically stupid.
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Oct 16, 2017 07:02
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Yeah, I take advantage of that when I can. I like that you can still steamroll your closest neighbour at the start of the game without any penalties too.
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Oct 16, 2017 08:05
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Eric the Mauve posted:Unless you're super duper into playing peacefully, it's Civ 4. If you want your game to resemble Civ 2, it's Civ 4. Civ 2 itself still holds up, actually, if you can get it running on a modern machine and can live with the prehistoric UI. (I still play Civ 1 on DOSBox occasionally and it's still fun.) I don't understand why you say this. It's much better to play peacefully in Civ4 because enemies don't randomly declare war on you like they do in 6. You can't escape war in 6, even though the enemy are absolutely poo poo at it. They love trading joint war declarations and just attacking you out of nowhere.
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Oct 16, 2017 08:08
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homullus posted:yes, it is so confusing, why would anybody make a last-ditch effort to rid the world of a genocidal maniac, in what universe does that make sense Appeasement is actually useful if you can build you forces faster than the enemy or otherwise gain more from waiting than they do. A non-suicidal move would have been to secure some alliances for defence if possible to avoid being the next target, and then hopefully attacking when they get bogged down in another war of conquest. Launching a war you can't possible win alone is a terrible idea in any situation.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:01
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Taear posted:I don't understand why you say this. It's much better to play peacefully in Civ4 because enemies don't randomly declare war on you like they do in 6. 4 has plenty of leaders who will wardec you just because they had a big army that was getting bored. but i suppose that getting decd out of the blue by a pleased Monty is more "expected" than "random".
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Oct 16, 2017 15:04
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Whereas in Civ 5 you can't fight an aggressive war ever--or even counterattack an aggressor to weaken him--unless you're prepared to spend the rest of the game with every other civ hating your guts and ganging up on you. Defending the stuff you're lovingly building from aggression is a compelling part of peaceful building and it works well in Civ 5 and 6. So long as you never ever do anything aggressive. If you have fun being aggressive and actually taking cities from AI civs, Civ 5 and 6 are not for you and you will enjoy Civ 4 more. As mentioned upthread, you *can* play a peaceful/defensive game in Civ 4, but Civ 5 and 6 are tailored to that play style and better at it. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 15:14
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Prav posted:4 has plenty of leaders who will wardec you just because they had a big army that was getting bored. Let's be completely honest, this is actually the best and most reasonable reason to wardec anyone in a game, Civ or otherwise, single and multi player both.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:18
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I'd be way more on board with 5 & 6 if the AI had any ability to play the military game whatsoever. I always feel embarrassed for Firaxis when some country declares war on me, and 10+ units swarm towards my city only to be held off by a single archer and warrior or whatever.  It simply is not a credible threat.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POvyttyA8EU at 53 seconds in, we can see that the building queue still overlaps over the description of what you are building on the bottom. This is what I've been using since launch to tell if an update is going to be poo poo because it's easily fixed, and clearly not intended. This patch is going to be poo poo. Again. The Human Crouton fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 15:30
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In my experience in Civ 5 the most efficient way to play pacifist is to have a huge rear end army. Nobody will attack you, ever
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Oct 16, 2017 15:35
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Serephina posted:Let's be completely honest, this is actually the best and most reasonable reason to wardec anyone in a game, Civ or otherwise, single and multi player both. yeah i don't mind IVs system at all. though i do wish the WHEOOH-warning was more prominent in the default UI.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:40
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played my first game since a couple big patches ago. Peter rang me up in the stone age to yell at me about researching nuclear weapons. Firaxis you're doing great sweetie
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Oct 16, 2017 15:41
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Copied from Civfanatics : Khmer: Ability - Grand Barays - faith and Amenities from aqueducts, farms get bonus food if adjacent to aqueducts Leader Ability - Monasteries of the King - + Food and Housing for Holy Sites next to rivers, Holy Sites land Grab Unique Unit - Domray - Siege Elephant Unique Building - Prasat - Missionaries get martyr, also has relic slots
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Oct 16, 2017 16:00
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I'm playing a game of civ 5 right now and I've been at war with Korea for as long as I can remember. They won't accept any form of peace talks because they have a military score like 50 times mine, but I also haven't seen a single one of their units for like 150 turns.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:09
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Kalko posted:If they could find a way to hit the brakes on technological advancement while still providing challenging gameplay, that would be peak Civ for me. I don't know if you guys ever played the Civ facebook game from a few years ago (it was poo poo), but it had an interesting mechanic in that there was a gimmick each era. For example, in the medieval era, science was cut by 75% or some such. That really slowed things down. The devs could try something similar, or institute some sort of mechanic for declining marginal returns. Personally, I'd like it if they weakened the power of hammers. Hammers get you more poo poo, so you're always going to build things that give you more of those (similar to how science gets you more tech). If districts or buildings had a population requirement, or required food / commerce / culture requirements, that could further incentivize you to build a variety of districts, especially if your terrain yields encouraged it.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:15
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One thing they could try is some kinda of technology expansion mechanic, where a tech passively would spread to civs you have contact with over time That could help prevent the tech snowballing that usually happens mid/late game, keeping the game more competitive through the end, and also dumb "spearmen vs tank" situations
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Oct 16, 2017 16:38
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Mymla posted:I'm playing a game of civ 5 right now and I've been at war with Korea for as long as I can remember. They won't accept any form of peace talks because they have a military score like 50 times mine, but I also haven't seen a single one of their units for like 150 turns. drat, tha'ts some genuine true-to-life accuracy.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:39
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Elias_Maluco posted:One thing they could try is some kinda of technology expansion mechanic, where a tech passively would spread to civs you have contact with over time Wasn't that kind of the idea behind research agreements in 5? I always liked the idea even if it was implemented kind of poorly.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:05
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Wirth1000 posted:drat, tha'ts some genuine true-to-life accuracy. Lol I thought that myself. Although "never seen a unit" isn't quite right. Mymla, are you sure Korea isn't occasionally throwing a cruise missile at the ocean?
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Oct 16, 2017 17:27
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Elias_Maluco posted:One thing they could try is some kinda of technology expansion mechanic, where a tech passively would spread to civs you have contact with over time Niwrad posted:Wasn't that kind of the idea behind research agreements in 5? I always liked the idea even if it was implemented kind of poorly. Research agreements were one way to flatten the tech leads but actually there was already a passive spread mechanic just like Elias describes - science spreads through trade routes. A Civ with more techs would leak beakers through its trade routes to Civs with fewer techs, the bigger the difference the bigger the leak. The leaks were tiny though and as a rubberbanding mechanic it was super weak. I would love to have seen the leaks multiplied by like a factor of 5 or something - I reckon trade routes would have been far more interesting if so.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:33
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Research agreements were one way to flatten the tech leads but actually there was already a passive spread mechanic just like Elias describes - science spreads through trade routes. A Civ with more techs would leak beakers through its trade routes to Civs with fewer techs, the bigger the difference the bigger the leak. yeah, we had those mechanics but they werent nearly enough to make a real difference It would be certaingly a novelty a civ game that wanst a race to get so ahead in tech that you will become invincible by midgame, as it usually happens
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Oct 16, 2017 17:38
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:The leaks were tiny though and as a rubberbanding mechanic it was super weak. I would love to have seen the leaks multiplied by like a factor of 5 or something - I reckon trade routes would have been far more interesting if so. Wasn't the rubberbanding mechanic that each time a tech was researched in the game, the cost of the tech would reduce by 10% or something? Did I just make this up?
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Oct 16, 2017 17:50
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Elias_Maluco posted:One thing they could try is some kinda of technology expansion mechanic, where a tech passively would spread to civs you have contact with over time This already happens. Techs get a discount when more civs know that tech.
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Oct 16, 2017 18:04
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Borsche69 posted:This already happens. Techs get a discount when more civs know that tech. True, but that inst enough either, and actually also helps whoever is winning the tech race: I will usually set a path to the most important techs (the ones which leads to more science generation and the wonders I want and etc) and research whatever is in that path while ignoring the ones out of it. Then later I can just research in 1/2 turns anything my much less advanced neighbors had that I skipped, further widening out tech gap (because whatever tech only 1 player have wont be that cheaper for the rest) Elias_Maluco fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 18:29
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