For me, Civ5 is the first and only Civ game I've ever liked. I won't play a 4x game that allows doom stacks (if it doesn't have tactical combat) because it makes the combat too simple and completely boring. Sure, Civ5's combat isn't the greatest 4x combat ever, but it's still quite fun IMO. As for the whole "Civ5 is dumbed down crap for simpletons" well I can't understand that at all. If it's simple to you, I guess go connect your super computer brain to something more worthy of your cpu cycles. I enjoy complex games too, but just bcause Civ5 doesn't have 50,000 sliders to control every aspect of your society or something doesn't mean it's too simple. Complexity for the sake of complexity does not make a great game. Meaningful choices with interesting, tangible outcomes do and I think Civ5 offers alot of them. Now if you don't like it because it changed XYZ from Civ1-4, I can totally understand that even if I don't agree.
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It's alright, but it suffers sometimes when several nations in the same area have very similar colors. I mean, that's really hard to avoid with how many different counties/duchies/kingdoms/empires the game has, but it still detracts a little bit sometimes. The biggest complaint with the UI for most people is simply that there is so much information available, that figuring out where that one crucial piece of info you need right that instant can be frustrating. I played through a game from 1066 until the end date of 1453 or whatever, and it wasn't until the early 1400s that I figured out how to use the realm tree to see how large an army the enemy could potentially field.
Yeah stacks vs 1UPT has really divided the Civ community.
Most are decidedly in favor of the change but there's still a vocal minority that hates it with a passion, and not entirely without merit.
That said, I personally think it's been for the better, though I'd still prefer 2UPT.
What I don't really like about 1UPT is that the maps aren't properly sized for it - it makes things feel claustrophobic to me when, for instance, four units is all you need (and all you can really fit) in a "WW2 in Europe"-type theater on normal-sized maps.
Of course, I'm coming at this from an old-school hex war gaming background (SSI, Elven Legacy-style stuff), where any given single battle would have map sizes and unit counts comparable to world- or continent-spanning wars in CiV.
Yeah stacks vs 1UPT has really divided the Civ community.
Most are decidedly in favor of the change but there's still a vocal minority that hates it with a passion, and not entirely without merit.
That said, I personally think it's been for the better, though I'd still prefer 2UPT.
What I don't really like about 1UPT is that the maps aren't properly sized for it - it makes things feel claustrophobic to me when, for instance, four units is all you need (and all you can really fit) in a "WW2 in Europe"-type theater on normal-sized maps.
Of course, I'm coming at this from an old-school hex war gaming background (SSI, Elven Legacy-style stuff), where any given single battle would have map sizes and unit counts comparable to world- or continent-spanning wars in CiV.
Same. My only hang-up with 1UPT is that combat becomes incredibly abstract. Archers a tile away? Which represents how many hundreds of miles?
1UPT is also incredibly clunky and frankly conquering becomes a chore after you have to move each unit individually and place it juuuusssstt right.
Endless Space had a decent system where stacks would meet and then you would have battles you could influence, but not directly control. Wasn't perfect but it protected the scale of map and combat, which Civ doesn't do. Much to my disappointment.
Civilization is probably one of the most casual series of strategy games ever published. It's one of the series great strengths, and what makes it so popular. There is nothing wrong with being casual.
'Casual' is kind of a loaded term. I mean, there's playing games casually, which you're describing, and that's fine - but it's also a word tied heavily to mobile games that are marketed as 'casual', because they have built-in timers that prompt you to either wait or pay money to keep playing. Publishers pushed this crap (mostly aimed at kids with smartphones) as 'casual gaming' because, hey, you only play for [X] amount of time in short bursts! It's totes healthier than longer play sessions! This totes isn't a system designed to rob you blind, we swear!
I think that's the stripe people like to paint with when using the term negatively.
For me, the thing that Civ V brought to the table that I love most is the turn flow manager on the right hand side of the screen. Any modern 4X game released since Civ V that's worth half a damn has implemented a similar system, and for good reason. I think a lot of game genres could use that sort of game flow tool to open-up the experience for new players & make the experiencing less headache-inducing for veterans (hi real time strategy game, I'm looking at you!)
1UPT is also incredibly clunky and frankly conquering becomes a chore after you have to move each unit individually and place it juuuusssstt right.
Uh, as opposed to moving around hundreds of units juuuuuussssstttt right to form your doom stacks in the first place, whereupon you just throw them at one another?
For the record, I'd be happy with 2UPT. - 1 Offensive, 1 Defensive (Defensive being they have a higher defense than attack).
Also, I wish they'd bring back airbases in Civ. The range on planes was short enough in Civ 5 that if you had no desire to capture cities, you were forced to use Carriers out the ass (which sucked doubly if you didn't have carriers yet). I can't imagine this will be much of a problem in Civ:BE due to the sci-fi nature.
It's alright, but it suffers sometimes when several nations in the same area have very similar colors. I mean, that's really hard to avoid with how many different counties/duchies/kingdoms/empires the game has, but it still detracts a little bit sometimes. The biggest complaint with the UI for most people is simply that there is so much information available, that figuring out where that one crucial piece of info you need right that instant can be frustrating. I played through a game from 1066 until the end date of 1453 or whatever, and it wasn't until the early 1400s that I figured out how to use the realm tree to see how large an army the enemy could potentially field.
Pretty sure that's in the tutorial, BTW.
I'm not entirely sure it is. I played all of the tutorials available in the demo version, at least, and I don't remember that being pointed out. Then again the tutorials were a little buggy and wouldn't work properly if you had done the previous demo sometimes. I'm not saying I could build a better UI, and once you get used to it you can find what you want pretty quickly, but I think that adjustment period takes longer than for Civ V. The Civ V UI is just really good, and while CK2 has a serviceable UI (super pretty when playing as a Norse Pagan, too), I think it could be improved a decent amount.
To try and keep this at least tangentially related to the thread, I'm hopeful that the UI in Beyond Earth will be mostly the same as Civ V. Hopefully they'll even find ways to improve it, like making it more obvious what is and is not an interact-able object.
1UPT is also incredibly clunky and frankly conquering becomes a chore after you have to move each unit individually and place it juuuusssstt right.
Uh, as opposed to moving around hundreds of units juuuuuussssstttt right to form your doom stacks in the first place, whereupon you just throw them at one another?
Not really? With doomstacks you just send everything to one or two tiles as they're produced, and then when it's war time you send the whole shebang in the general direction of the enemy. With 1UPT you still move your units as they're produced, but into a formation rather than into one tile, and then when it's war time you send each one toward the enemy, in a particular order because otherwise they can't all move. And God forbid you want to readjust your forces at some point when you have a line more than 1 tile thick in hilly or forested terrain. I don't disagree that 1UPT creates more strategy to war, but it can certainly create more tedium as well.
I think at the end of the day some people appreciate the extra strategic (okay tactical) decisions that 1UPT allows, while others would rather that war was more or less an economic battle fought largely before the shots are actually fired (doomstacks, larger/better army wins the day generally). Both of those are valid.
Yeah stacks vs 1UPT has really divided the Civ community.
Most are decidedly in favor of the change but there's still a vocal minority that hates it with a passion, and not entirely without merit.
That said, I personally think it's been for the better, though I'd still prefer 2UPT.
What I don't really like about 1UPT is that the maps aren't properly sized for it - it makes things feel claustrophobic to me when, for instance, four units is all you need (and all you can really fit) in a "WW2 in Europe"-type theater on normal-sized maps.
Of course, I'm coming at this from an old-school hex war gaming background (SSI, Elven Legacy-style stuff), where any given single battle would have map sizes and unit counts comparable to world- or continent-spanning wars in CiV.
Same. My only hang-up with 1UPT is that combat becomes incredibly abstract. Archers a tile away? Which represents how many hundreds of miles?
1UPT is also incredibly clunky and frankly conquering becomes a chore after you have to move each unit individually and place it juuuusssstt right.
Endless Space had a decent system where stacks would meet and then you would have battles you could influence, but not directly control. Wasn't perfect but it protected the scale of map and combat, which Civ doesn't do. Much to my disappointment.
I guess I just am looking for a completely different game than some of you are. I don't really think of scale or combat in a 4X being 1:1 to the real world but more an abstraction of reality. I also can't get into games where I don't get to directly control the combat. I absolutely hated the combat in Endless Space for that reason. Completely ruined the game for me as without enjoyable combat, building an empire just isn't as fun. That said I enjoy all the victory conditions in Civ5 and don't always set out to wage war. However that's because you still have to defend yourself somehow while going for the other victory conditions. Using city states in a proxy war is fun too.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Other games like the Total War series run into the abstraction of distance/time problem as well. In TW, you find that the armies can't actually strategically maneuver so much as they just use up all their movement in a single turn going from Point A to Point B (and in some cases, the time distortion is so bad that armies can't actually traverse the distances necessary to conquer regions that they historically did).
The other issue of the strategic and tactical layers getting completely lost is also something the series encounters, although that's alleviated a bit by having a tactical battle portion (I think someone mentioned another game that does something similar, where the macro-hex gets shrunk into micro-hex whenever units engage each other).
The real problem is that you can't have turns which span huge time periods such as years or decades and then expect to realistically mirror the fast-paced nature of warfare, particularly once technology lets you fly distances in hours that used to take decades themselves.
The only way to more accurately represent this dilation is to dramatically increase the size of the maps and shorten the time between turns. Civ kind of does this already, since turns change their value, in terms of time, depending upon the era you are in. But for the actual distance issue, particularly when combined with the actual unit scale (e.g., a phalanx vs. a tank) issue, this is a half-measure at best.
So ideally, maps would be significantly larger, and unit production would be commensurately faster/larger in scale (perhaps you produce multiple units at a time, for example). But then this runs into the other problem, where units are simulated accurately to scale but you end up spending hours just moving dozens/hundreds/thousands of units tediously across a map the vast majority of the time, when that level of scale is just completely unnecessary.
The more I think about it, I kind of like the idea of the combined armies moving in the larger hex grid with a smaller tactical/hex map opening up for the actual engagement. But I do kind of agree with the sentiment that Civ 5 maps generally just feel too "small". In general, I wouldn't mind there being more turns in a given game, with units being drastically cheaper and map sizes increased accordingly.
Other games like the Total War series run into the abstraction of distance/time problem as well. In TW, you find that the armies can't actually strategically maneuver so much as they just use up all their movement in a single turn going from Point A to Point B (and in some cases, the time distortion is so bad that armies can't actually traverse the distances necessary to conquer regions that they historically did).
The other issue of the strategic and tactical layers getting completely lost is also something the series encounters, although that's alleviated a bit by having a tactical battle portion (I think someone mentioned another game that does something similar, where the macro-hex gets shrunk into micro-hex whenever units engage each other).
The real problem is that you can't have turns which span huge time periods such as years or decades and then expect to realistically mirror the fast-paced nature of warfare, particularly once technology lets you fly distances in hours that used to take decades themselves.
The only way to more accurately represent this dilation is to dramatically increase the size of the maps and shorten the time between turns. Civ kind of does this already, since turns change their value, in terms of time, depending upon the era you are in. But for the actual distance issue, particularly when combined with the actual unit scale (e.g., a phalanx vs. a tank) issue, this is a half-measure at best.
So ideally, maps would be significantly larger, and unit production would be commensurately faster/larger in scale (perhaps you produce multiple units at a time, for example). But then this runs into the other problem, where units are simulated accurately to scale but you end up spending hours just moving dozens/hundreds/thousands of units tediously across a map the vast majority of the time, when that level of scale is just completely unnecessary.
The more I think about it, I kind of like the idea of the combined armies moving in the larger hex grid with a smaller tactical/hex map opening up for the actual engagement. But I do kind of agree with the sentiment that Civ 5 maps generally just feel too "small". In general, I wouldn't mind there being more turns in a given game, with units being drastically cheaper and map sizes increased accordingly.
This is sort of like the tactical combat of the Age of Wonders series, though I guess with less RPG elements for the units themselves. I really love that kind of combat, it's extremely fun for someone like me who enjoys the warfare in 4X games.
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Age of Wonders 3 has beautiful combat mechanics (actually, the same could be said for that entire series - but 3 is clearly the pinnacle right now). Limited stack sizes engaging in tactical maps; salients become incredibly important, as does holding bridges & other chokepoints without said chokepoints just becoming ez mode meat grinders.
Civ probably wouldn't work well with a tactical layer, but damn it solves a lot of problems.
I think Civ could work with a tactical layer. Allow some large number per stack, like 12 units per tile. Have the same kind of army adjacency rules as AoW3 does so that multiple armies can fight in 1 battle but space is still important. Then the game just generates a tactical map with hexes on it much like the "big picture" map based on the terrain of the the tiles the units are on. Units in Civ5 have all those cool terrain based vet bonuses, so they could make the terrain in the tactical map really matter.
I think the real issue is that it just wouldn't feel very Civ, much as I would enjoy it. Which is exactly why alot of long time Civ fans hate 1UPT I think. To them, that doesn't feel very Civ.
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The problem with realistic timescales is that domination is king. Play a marathon game and see how reasonable it is to win the game through science compared to just finishing off the rest of the world with your unit advantage that now moves effectively 4 times as fast as it does on normal time. On quick the enemy can scout your force and start building to have defenses as it arrives. On marathon by the time you see it built it's too late.
At the end of the day the game will always be a game with concrete goals and those concrete goals f things up when we talk about simulation. This is one reason the real simulation games tend to stick to specific time periods with low technology growth and no defined start and production positions.
A huge map on civ is too small when you think about cities. One city takes up all of Spain! On the other hand anything larger than that and gameplay becomes an unmanageable mess because that is what happens when shit gets large. (Galciv has this problem to the max, as the optimal solution is to settle every world now and forever and then you've got 100 cities and it's unmanageable except to delegate (but no one liked MOO 3!).
I agree with Goumindong completely. Games are supposed to be fun, so finding the right balance between simulation and abstraction for strategy games is important. Granted, there are some people who prefer a purely simulated, realistic style of game where there is just hundreds of cities with dozens of sliders for various things per city that you have to manage - and that's fine too. However I think alot of people prefer something like Civ that strikes a balance between abstracting cities to take up unrealistic amounts of map space vs deciding what your peasants are going to have for breakfast each turn.
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The problem with realistic timescales is that domination is king. Play a marathon game and see how reasonable it is to win the game through science compared to just finishing off the rest of the world with your unit advantage that now moves effectively 4 times as fast as it does on normal time. On quick the enemy can scout your force and start building to have defenses as it arrives. On marathon by the time you see it built it's too late.
At the end of the day the game will always be a game with concrete goals and those concrete goals f things up when we talk about simulation. This is one reason the real simulation games tend to stick to specific time periods with low technology growth and no defined start and production positions.
A huge map on civ is too small when you think about cities. One city takes up all of Spain! On the other hand anything larger than that and gameplay becomes an unmanageable mess because that is what happens when shit gets large. (Galciv has this problem to the max, as the optimal solution is to settle every world now and forever and then you've got 100 cities and it's unmanageable except to delegate (but no one liked MOO 3!).
Well, one of the complaints about MOO3 was that the governor AI was terrible. In fact, that's one of the important spots where human players have a major advantage over the AI.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
The problem with realistic timescales is that domination is king. Play a marathon game and see how reasonable it is to win the game through science compared to just finishing off the rest of the world with your unit advantage that now moves effectively 4 times as fast as it does on normal time. On quick the enemy can scout your force and start building to have defenses as it arrives. On marathon by the time you see it built it's too late.
At the end of the day the game will always be a game with concrete goals and those concrete goals f things up when we talk about simulation. This is one reason the real simulation games tend to stick to specific time periods with low technology growth and no defined start and production positions.
A huge map on civ is too small when you think about cities. One city takes up all of Spain! On the other hand anything larger than that and gameplay becomes an unmanageable mess because that is what happens when shit gets large. (Galciv has this problem to the max, as the optimal solution is to settle every world now and forever and then you've got 100 cities and it's unmanageable except to delegate (but no one liked MOO 3!).
Well like I said, that's why you need to make units drastically cheaper (or even allow for them to be produced via a separate queue/process).
But there are definitely problems across the board any time you start messing with the level of abstraction in the game (or change any game mechanic, really). I'm sure the Civ team has had to make some really tough calls, and at the end of the day they (rightly) went with what was more fun and interesting to play as opposed to more "accurate".
Like, even if you balanced out the military/unit portion, there's definitely an additional level of tedium that gets involved. If you want to go with a science win, you probably don't want to have to fight a bunch of defensive tactical battles just because if you don't, the enemy AI will overwhelm you with units. Even throwing in an auto-resolve or auto-manage feature just means you're adding a bunch of meaningless clicks instead of actually making the game more fun or meaningful to play.
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Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
I know no one is claiming Civ to be an intensely realistic game or anything, but I get tickled when its mechanics are put under scrutiny with regards to accuracy and realism, like doomstacks being totally more realistic than 1UPT, or unit movement and timescales, and innumerable other minutae.
You know, a series where George Washington can build the Great Pyramids and found Confuscianism.
Seriously, you guys should check out Endless Legend.
The combat systems you're describing as wanting are effectively what is in that game. I haven't gotten deep into it yet (finished the tutorial and that's it), but it seriously sounds exactly like what you say you want.
More than 1 unit per hex, but with limitations so it doesn't become a stack of doom. Once you enter combat, the armies split out so that they're spread over the tactical area (it's still the map, but kinda supposed to "imagine" it's a zoomed in version) and then you fight it out between your armies on that, over a series of individual turns just for that battle. It's possible for one to win, the other to win, or both to survive.
On top of this, you micromanage what equipment each unit has so you can make your own units, and you can have Heroes (read: kinda like generals) attached to armies to give them boosts.
Might be a good way to whet your 4x appetite until Beyond Earth comes out.
Basically, this comes down to: people want to control everything, but controlling everything's also really fucking tedious, and computers can't take millennia of human development all over Earth and compact it into a detailed, realistic simulation that runs in ~6 hours and is customizable and entertaining to an immortal, omnipotent human actor.
It also depends on what the player wants to control, what area of the game they want to have more control and depth. Every game can't be everything to everyone.
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I think the franchise still has a lot of room to progress, and that progress involves taking a hard look at the very existence and use of: units, tiles, and cities.
That and per-turn advantage needs to die as the primary strategic consideration.
Basically, this comes down to: people want to control everything, but controlling everything's also really fucking tedious, and computers can't take millennia of human development all over Earth and compact it into a detailed, realistic simulation that runs in ~6 hours and is customizable and entertaining to an immortal, omnipotent human actor.
Man I don't think I've ever had a civ game take less 10 hours barring tiny map games.
Sorry, I thought this was the thread to talk about Beyond Earth. Guess I'll hop in the Civ V thread to talk about it.
Admittedly most of us are accustomed to there being only one thread per game franchise. Didn't even realize there was a Civ V thread myself. (And the Search function isn't great at finding individual threads, only posts).
So, having grown up on Civ II, I distinctly remember the releases of Civ III, IV, and V.
They really need to make it a crime to release these things during the school semester.
When I was in 7th or 8th grade I found a microprose collection at Sam's that had civ 1(which we'd gotten several years before when it came out), colonization, and Master of Orion. I begged my mom to get it for me, and she gave in, On the condition that I couldn't play it until the end of the school year. Which was about 3 months away.
As if that wasn't hard enough, a guy at my church who was one of my many nerd mentors gave me his copy of the MoO strategy guide when I told him. I have never been so eager for summer break. Totally worth it though.
Sorry, I thought this was the thread to talk about Beyond Earth. Guess I'll hop in the Civ V thread to talk about it.
Admittedly most of us are accustomed to there being only one thread per game franchise. Didn't even realize there was a Civ V thread myself. (And the Search function isn't great at finding individual threads, only posts).
I was mostly just being snarky, but I think the conversation about other civ games got a bit acerbic.
Basically, this comes down to: people want to control everything, but controlling everything's also really fucking tedious, and computers can't take millennia of human development all over Earth and compact it into a detailed, realistic simulation that runs in ~6 hours and is customizable and entertaining to an immortal, omnipotent human actor.
It's only everything a capricious uncaring godchild would want...
It's weird how specific my memory of getting civ 1 is. We went to supercuts to get me and my dad's hair cut. There was a long wait so we made a trip to target. I saw it there on the special end of shelf display. The big box. Heavy with a giant manual and telltale rattle of at least three floppies. I knew I had something special. And best of all, it looked educational. This, finally, was a game I could get my parents behind.
We went back to wait for my turn to get trimmed, and I sat there, turning the box over and over, reading the back, looking at the mural of the wonders on the front, practically drooling.
It was just as awesome as I imagined. My dad played. Even my sister, who hardly ever plays anything other than minesweeper (at which she is a beast) played a couple games.
Civ is the first game where I exploited mechanics until they broke and one of the only ones where I figured out how to do so with no external help even now. My preferred strategy was to abuse the guaranteed peace offer from the Great Wall/UN by surrounding enemy cities with diplomats because they were cheap, had no support cost, and ignored zones of control. But just by occupying the square it prevented the tile from being worked. Eventually my army of Abe Lincoln impersonators would starve a city down to just a few population points, at which point I would send one in to incite a revolution at a cheap rate. I'd snag a few cities per turn then have them offer peace. Sometimes the game's math for determining the cost of revolution or a unit switching sides would end up being a huge negative number and I'd have a tank or city pay be several thousand goal to join my empire.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
edited September 2014
Wow. This thread got really goosey for a page there.
I got my preorder in. Really looking forward to a new Civ though. After putting in some 450 hours into civ 5, I am ready for something new. Some weekend I would like to get a few folks together to bang out a game. Once I have had a chance to get a game or 2 under my belt, that is.
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Most are decidedly in favor of the change but there's still a vocal minority that hates it with a passion, and not entirely without merit.
That said, I personally think it's been for the better, though I'd still prefer 2UPT.
Pretty sure that's in the tutorial, BTW.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
What I don't really like about 1UPT is that the maps aren't properly sized for it - it makes things feel claustrophobic to me when, for instance, four units is all you need (and all you can really fit) in a "WW2 in Europe"-type theater on normal-sized maps.
Of course, I'm coming at this from an old-school hex war gaming background (SSI, Elven Legacy-style stuff), where any given single battle would have map sizes and unit counts comparable to world- or continent-spanning wars in CiV.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
They really need to make it a crime to release these things during the school semester.
Same. My only hang-up with 1UPT is that combat becomes incredibly abstract. Archers a tile away? Which represents how many hundreds of miles?
1UPT is also incredibly clunky and frankly conquering becomes a chore after you have to move each unit individually and place it juuuusssstt right.
Endless Space had a decent system where stacks would meet and then you would have battles you could influence, but not directly control. Wasn't perfect but it protected the scale of map and combat, which Civ doesn't do. Much to my disappointment.
'Casual' is kind of a loaded term. I mean, there's playing games casually, which you're describing, and that's fine - but it's also a word tied heavily to mobile games that are marketed as 'casual', because they have built-in timers that prompt you to either wait or pay money to keep playing. Publishers pushed this crap (mostly aimed at kids with smartphones) as 'casual gaming' because, hey, you only play for [X] amount of time in short bursts! It's totes healthier than longer play sessions! This totes isn't a system designed to rob you blind, we swear!
I think that's the stripe people like to paint with when using the term negatively.
For me, the thing that Civ V brought to the table that I love most is the turn flow manager on the right hand side of the screen. Any modern 4X game released since Civ V that's worth half a damn has implemented a similar system, and for good reason. I think a lot of game genres could use that sort of game flow tool to open-up the experience for new players & make the experiencing less headache-inducing for veterans (hi real time strategy game, I'm looking at you!)
Uh, as opposed to moving around hundreds of units juuuuuussssstttt right to form your doom stacks in the first place, whereupon you just throw them at one another?
Also, I wish they'd bring back airbases in Civ. The range on planes was short enough in Civ 5 that if you had no desire to capture cities, you were forced to use Carriers out the ass (which sucked doubly if you didn't have carriers yet). I can't imagine this will be much of a problem in Civ:BE due to the sci-fi nature.
I'm not entirely sure it is. I played all of the tutorials available in the demo version, at least, and I don't remember that being pointed out. Then again the tutorials were a little buggy and wouldn't work properly if you had done the previous demo sometimes. I'm not saying I could build a better UI, and once you get used to it you can find what you want pretty quickly, but I think that adjustment period takes longer than for Civ V. The Civ V UI is just really good, and while CK2 has a serviceable UI (super pretty when playing as a Norse Pagan, too), I think it could be improved a decent amount.
To try and keep this at least tangentially related to the thread, I'm hopeful that the UI in Beyond Earth will be mostly the same as Civ V. Hopefully they'll even find ways to improve it, like making it more obvious what is and is not an interact-able object.
Not really? With doomstacks you just send everything to one or two tiles as they're produced, and then when it's war time you send the whole shebang in the general direction of the enemy. With 1UPT you still move your units as they're produced, but into a formation rather than into one tile, and then when it's war time you send each one toward the enemy, in a particular order because otherwise they can't all move. And God forbid you want to readjust your forces at some point when you have a line more than 1 tile thick in hilly or forested terrain. I don't disagree that 1UPT creates more strategy to war, but it can certainly create more tedium as well.
I think at the end of the day some people appreciate the extra strategic (okay tactical) decisions that 1UPT allows, while others would rather that war was more or less an economic battle fought largely before the shots are actually fired (doomstacks, larger/better army wins the day generally). Both of those are valid.
I guess I just am looking for a completely different game than some of you are. I don't really think of scale or combat in a 4X being 1:1 to the real world but more an abstraction of reality. I also can't get into games where I don't get to directly control the combat. I absolutely hated the combat in Endless Space for that reason. Completely ruined the game for me as without enjoyable combat, building an empire just isn't as fun. That said I enjoy all the victory conditions in Civ5 and don't always set out to wage war. However that's because you still have to defend yourself somehow while going for the other victory conditions. Using city states in a proxy war is fun too.
The other issue of the strategic and tactical layers getting completely lost is also something the series encounters, although that's alleviated a bit by having a tactical battle portion (I think someone mentioned another game that does something similar, where the macro-hex gets shrunk into micro-hex whenever units engage each other).
The real problem is that you can't have turns which span huge time periods such as years or decades and then expect to realistically mirror the fast-paced nature of warfare, particularly once technology lets you fly distances in hours that used to take decades themselves.
The only way to more accurately represent this dilation is to dramatically increase the size of the maps and shorten the time between turns. Civ kind of does this already, since turns change their value, in terms of time, depending upon the era you are in. But for the actual distance issue, particularly when combined with the actual unit scale (e.g., a phalanx vs. a tank) issue, this is a half-measure at best.
So ideally, maps would be significantly larger, and unit production would be commensurately faster/larger in scale (perhaps you produce multiple units at a time, for example). But then this runs into the other problem, where units are simulated accurately to scale but you end up spending hours just moving dozens/hundreds/thousands of units tediously across a map the vast majority of the time, when that level of scale is just completely unnecessary.
The more I think about it, I kind of like the idea of the combined armies moving in the larger hex grid with a smaller tactical/hex map opening up for the actual engagement. But I do kind of agree with the sentiment that Civ 5 maps generally just feel too "small". In general, I wouldn't mind there being more turns in a given game, with units being drastically cheaper and map sizes increased accordingly.
This is sort of like the tactical combat of the Age of Wonders series, though I guess with less RPG elements for the units themselves. I really love that kind of combat, it's extremely fun for someone like me who enjoys the warfare in 4X games.
Civ probably wouldn't work well with a tactical layer, but damn it solves a lot of problems.
I think the real issue is that it just wouldn't feel very Civ, much as I would enjoy it. Which is exactly why alot of long time Civ fans hate 1UPT I think. To them, that doesn't feel very Civ.
At the end of the day the game will always be a game with concrete goals and those concrete goals f things up when we talk about simulation. This is one reason the real simulation games tend to stick to specific time periods with low technology growth and no defined start and production positions.
A huge map on civ is too small when you think about cities. One city takes up all of Spain! On the other hand anything larger than that and gameplay becomes an unmanageable mess because that is what happens when shit gets large. (Galciv has this problem to the max, as the optimal solution is to settle every world now and forever and then you've got 100 cities and it's unmanageable except to delegate (but no one liked MOO 3!).
Well, one of the complaints about MOO3 was that the governor AI was terrible. In fact, that's one of the important spots where human players have a major advantage over the AI.
Well like I said, that's why you need to make units drastically cheaper (or even allow for them to be produced via a separate queue/process).
But there are definitely problems across the board any time you start messing with the level of abstraction in the game (or change any game mechanic, really). I'm sure the Civ team has had to make some really tough calls, and at the end of the day they (rightly) went with what was more fun and interesting to play as opposed to more "accurate".
Like, even if you balanced out the military/unit portion, there's definitely an additional level of tedium that gets involved. If you want to go with a science win, you probably don't want to have to fight a bunch of defensive tactical battles just because if you don't, the enemy AI will overwhelm you with units. Even throwing in an auto-resolve or auto-manage feature just means you're adding a bunch of meaningless clicks instead of actually making the game more fun or meaningful to play.
You know, a series where George Washington can build the Great Pyramids and found Confuscianism.
The combat systems you're describing as wanting are effectively what is in that game. I haven't gotten deep into it yet (finished the tutorial and that's it), but it seriously sounds exactly like what you say you want.
More than 1 unit per hex, but with limitations so it doesn't become a stack of doom. Once you enter combat, the armies split out so that they're spread over the tactical area (it's still the map, but kinda supposed to "imagine" it's a zoomed in version) and then you fight it out between your armies on that, over a series of individual turns just for that battle. It's possible for one to win, the other to win, or both to survive.
On top of this, you micromanage what equipment each unit has so you can make your own units, and you can have Heroes (read: kinda like generals) attached to armies to give them boosts.
Might be a good way to whet your 4x appetite until Beyond Earth comes out.
That and per-turn advantage needs to die as the primary strategic consideration.
Man I don't think I've ever had a civ game take less 10 hours barring tiny map games.
Admittedly most of us are accustomed to there being only one thread per game franchise. Didn't even realize there was a Civ V thread myself. (And the Search function isn't great at finding individual threads, only posts).
When I was in 7th or 8th grade I found a microprose collection at Sam's that had civ 1(which we'd gotten several years before when it came out), colonization, and Master of Orion. I begged my mom to get it for me, and she gave in, On the condition that I couldn't play it until the end of the school year. Which was about 3 months away.
As if that wasn't hard enough, a guy at my church who was one of my many nerd mentors gave me his copy of the MoO strategy guide when I told him. I have never been so eager for summer break. Totally worth it though.
I was mostly just being snarky, but I think the conversation about other civ games got a bit acerbic.
It's only everything a capricious uncaring godchild would want...
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We went back to wait for my turn to get trimmed, and I sat there, turning the box over and over, reading the back, looking at the mural of the wonders on the front, practically drooling.
It was just as awesome as I imagined. My dad played. Even my sister, who hardly ever plays anything other than minesweeper (at which she is a beast) played a couple games.
Civ is the first game where I exploited mechanics until they broke and one of the only ones where I figured out how to do so with no external help even now. My preferred strategy was to abuse the guaranteed peace offer from the Great Wall/UN by surrounding enemy cities with diplomats because they were cheap, had no support cost, and ignored zones of control. But just by occupying the square it prevented the tile from being worked. Eventually my army of Abe Lincoln impersonators would starve a city down to just a few population points, at which point I would send one in to incite a revolution at a cheap rate. I'd snag a few cities per turn then have them offer peace. Sometimes the game's math for determining the cost of revolution or a unit switching sides would end up being a huge negative number and I'd have a tank or city pay be several thousand goal to join my empire.
I got my preorder in. Really looking forward to a new Civ though. After putting in some 450 hours into civ 5, I am ready for something new. Some weekend I would like to get a few folks together to bang out a game. Once I have had a chance to get a game or 2 under my belt, that is.
Progress without Shark-mounted lasers is not progress worth having.
Welp. Preorder canceled.
But at what cost?
Also I'm super stoked about this game and finally got around to preordering it the other night.
Now I just need to decide between:
Slavic Federation
African Union
ARC
Brazilia
And the last two affinities. I was leaning SF as Supremacy and AU as Purity, but know I'm not sure.
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