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I could be wrong because it’s been 20-25 years but back when Blizzard was still making single player Warcraft, my recollection is resources could and would run eventually out, and didn’t replenish
Same with the early C&C games
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Re: Super settlers - If I recall right Humankind does this, where later in the tech tree you unlock better and better settlers so cities can be founded with increased population, and they automatically have certain tiers of city buildings already built. Would definitely love to see that here.
As for wishlists, I would LOVE it if they finally let us make the same absurd demands of the AI that it makes of us. I want to be able to yell at my neighbor to fuck off with forward settling, or question that buildup of troops, and then have there be the same diplo consequences for them as for me. Very tired of that one way street.
Re: Super settlers - If I recall right Humankind does this, where later in the tech tree you unlock better and better settlers so cities can be founded with increased population, and they automatically have certain tiers of city buildings already built. Would definitely love to see that here.
As for wishlists, I would LOVE it if they finally let us make the same absurd demands of the AI that it makes of us. I want to be able to yell at my neighbor to fuck off with forward settling, or question that buildup of troops, and then have there be the same diplo consequences for them as for me. Very tired of that one way street.
Yep, also being able to pre empt things like religious conversion instead of waiting for them to convert a city.
Re: Super settlers - If I recall right Humankind does this, where later in the tech tree you unlock better and better settlers so cities can be founded with increased population, and they automatically have certain tiers of city buildings already built. Would definitely love to see that here.
As for wishlists, I would LOVE it if they finally let us make the same absurd demands of the AI that it makes of us. I want to be able to yell at my neighbor to fuck off with forward settling, or question that buildup of troops, and then have there be the same diplo consequences for them as for me. Very tired of that one way street.
IF Humankind didn't do that weird psedo-real-time thing it does I would call it better than most modern civ games.
The upgraded settler thing is one of the most consistent mod features. And one of their best ideas in a sea of feature bloat.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
I guess it kind of depends on what you want from a late game new city. By that point you've got powerhouse cities accomplishing what you want and a new city, even boosted, is going to spend most of its "city specific" resources (food and production) just fending for itself (you're not building wonders in that city). So a new city is either to:
(1) claim areas of the map, in which case you mainly need it to be defensible and that can be done by troops
(2) claim a resource, especially a new kind, in which case the feeling of a "colony city" that has less infrastructure but is subsidized by imports from the mainland feels pretty thematic.
(3) produce a universal resource like gold or faith.
A little boost for (2) is appropriate and a specific boost for (3) like a special kind of temple you can build in new cities that is cheap for its output would be cool. I seem to recall there being some late game settler boost in Civ 6 but I might be confusing it with Humankind again.
I did not like combat in Humankind in any case (especially as I played exclusively multiplayer with friends remotely, and it made some turns so....long....). Turning the map of my entire country into a Final Fantasy Tactics board makes no thematic sense and you so often wind up just "move army into enemy, repeat until dead". Civ 5-6 hex combat has this abstraction a little, but it abstracts it enough that you can imagine the fiction not as "my archer is firing upon the enemy from two states over" and more as "bring different types of units to the field for tactical superiority" so I was okay with it.
I was not a huge fan of it in humankind, but i do love it in Endless Legend. I LIKE having to deal with terrain/distance and allowing units to shine (ranged on a hill, melee blockers, etc). The simpler combat of Civ doesn't really allow for it well.
I did like how humankind allowed you to build walls/etc that truly kept out invaders, had their own health, etc.
I feel that if you are going to have a battle map, then you want to go to the Age of Wonders 3 level. The Endless Legend battle map and similar felt more like you were either overpowering the AI or abusing its limited capability to interact with the battlemap, especially with the time limit. Otherwise, despite its drawbacks I would prefer the Civ IV or Civ V combat styles. The problem with a battle map is it makes the focus of the game on the combat.
It really is a problem when you can win 90% of the time by abusing the AI on the battlemaps, but only win 20% of the same fights with autoresolve.
Civilization has always been in a weird spot between simulation and boardgame and in my opinion has stumbled the most when it tries to be everything to everyone.
Tactical combat is where I check out (and I love some games with it...mostly games by Simtex 30 years ago, but still). It shouldn't be about that.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
As a corollary to my previous comments, combat should be something where you feel like you are engaging with the AI on an equal footing. It is not satisfying to fight an AI that gets oodles of free units, and it isn't satisfying to fight an AI that doesn't understand the concept of ranged attackers or terrain. I know that asking for the AI to be able to handle all of that is a big ask, but especially at higher difficulties I shouldn't feel like I need to cheese the AI to win with their infinite free units.
Speaking of Simtex games, I enjoyed the MOO1 and MOO2 combat, but it works best with space combat where there is minimal terrain and not so well with ground based combat.
On a different topic regarding late game city development and infinite city crawl, something I've always like is the idea of transportation having more meaning over time. Early game, you can only bring materials in from the nearby area, but late game you should be able to build a resource extractor and tile improvements and link them up with specific cities. I recall one of the Civilization games allowing this (Civ 2, maybe?) and it always seemed like a good approach to take. Using this approach could make having some resources exhaust over time be feasible, if later technology allowed new deposits to be discovered and then linked up with your cities even if they are not located near the city.
1UPT has turned Civ 6 into a traffic simulator. It becomes unplayable with a simple open border treaty. I get people didn't like doom stacks, but choking under a flood of units in peace time is no better.
1UPT has turned Civ 6 into a traffic simulator. It becomes unplayable with a simple open border treaty. I get people didn't like doom stacks, but choking under a flood of units in peace time is no better.
Supply limits would have been a better solution to doom stacks IMO.
I wonder if the idea of army groups or hero groupings might help mitigate that. Going back to Age of Wonders, you typically have a commander hero unit and then up to 5 or 6 other units in an army. It allows mini-doom stacks which helps with the traffic jam, but also avoids the 20 army in a single tile doomstack situation.
There have honestly been other 1upt combat games where the ai seems to manage better though.
I feel like on thing is that maybe messes things up is that movement and range are so heavily restricted. I feel like a good bit of the time the ai either gets stuck in a traffic jam or sends its horseman way out in front and keeps archers and catapults way in the back so its forces don’t support each other.
Maybe moving infantry to base 2 movement, horse units to base 4, archers rage 3, while including zone of control/overwatch mechanics might make some sense?
Gladius AI seems to largely do find but it is a lot more fluid game.
1UPT is fine if a big battle is like, five or six units a side. Units should be expensive to make, powerful, hard to kill, dear to lose. But I don't think people want that because it sucks to take a long time to build a unit and you want to spam them. Civ5-6 patched that with armies but that just kinda gets you back to doomstacks.
1UPT definitely screws with scale (humankind is especially bad about this), but let's face it, Civ scale doesn't mean anything. Empires have single digits of cities, cities take up huge swatches of land, military units take decades to travel, etc etc.
Finished that Sitting Bull game, most satisfying Civ game in years. Only got 5 cities until Astronomy when I got six more on islands (they're important!), which finally gave me iron so I could make cannons. Kept rotating wars between Japan and Aztecs until I finished Japan, then Aztecs, then Germany stupidly attacked me and disappeared. Shaka had absorbed two AIs in the meantime so naturally he attacked and it turns out tanks and bombers are better than cavs. Basically won the game on my insane second city (double pigs + river on every tile and like ten hills). Had 280 hammers at the end.
Civ4 has actually interesting SP games, I would like that to come back.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
1UPT definitely screws with scale (humankind is especially bad about this), but let's face it, Civ scale doesn't mean anything. Empires have single digits of cities, cities take up huge swatches of land, military units take decades to travel, etc etc.
To follow this up, Civ scale works if you abstract it enough in your mind, though I think the game could help with this a bit.
A city isn't a city, it's a region. A mine isn't a mine, it's a mining town. The city center is not a town square and the industrial center a district of that city, they are both entirely separate cities in the metropolitan area. That doesn't work perfectly either but it's just a way of making it work in my head.
So I'm fine with the tactical combat if it's kept simple (ie not Humankind). Because I'm not picturing stationing my archers in Boston with some pikemen in Rhode Island to block them while they attack New York. I'm just picturing "tactically deploying specialized troops to utilize terrain and mitigate their weaknesses". With terms like "archer" and the dude on a map just being metaphors to make my brain understand and to make it more relataable than just dragging arrows around like Hearts of Iron or something.
Booted this up as I was trying to see if I could get my wife into it. Not sure what has happened over the years but the game runs terrible now. Every click of the interface seemed to take 5 seconds or longer to register. Turning on any of the medium or high graphics options caused the game to just crash. And by turn 15, the game was freezing constantly on my wife. Couldn't alt-tab out of it, so she had to power down her whole machine.
We both have very good laptops (We both have 3070's), I can't see how the game this old could be this demanding. I never had issues when playing with friends years ago. Is this 2K launcher the same PITA as the one for Midnight Suns? Or is it something with this leader pass version?
Highlights:
PC and Console at launch. Release date is 2/11/25
Leader and Civilization choice are independent (like unrestricted leaders always on)
Concept of a leader expanded so it's not just heads of state. Ben Franklin, notably. Hatshepsut was there. Amina, Napoleon, couldn't tell which Roman, Ashoka were the other ones I caught.
Ages, where your Civilization changes each age is the big new thing. Antiquity, Exploration, Modern, so three ages. Better able to balance civs because you've got unique stuff in every era. Can keep some of the old powers as you advance, but how that works isn't totally clear. You can always be a linked (loosely it looked like, Egypt --> Songhai for example) Civ, but can also become a Civ because of something you've done. Example they showed was having a certain number of horse resources in the Age of Antiquity lets you become Mongolia in the Age of Exploration.
Some Civs I saw: Egypt, Maurya, Mongolia, Rome, Songhai, I'm sure others will have stuff screenshotted.
Districts back, seems like cities sprawl even more. Might be hard to read? Looks pretty but possibly too much detail/clutter. My biggest worry coming out of that footage.
City states are here.
I think I saw a builder building a road again.
Chris Tin back to compose the opening theme.
Gwendoline Christie is your narrator.
Pricing: $70 base, $100 for Deluxe which gets you Tecumseh as a leader and Shawnee as a civ and some other bonus features, $130 for "Founders" which gets you Deluxe and it sounds like the first six DLCs and they're aiming for one a month. Deluxe/Founders also gets you five days early access.
enlightenedbum on
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
So they are just lifting the ages concept straight from humankind? It makes sense in a lot of ways, but it was a bit awkward morphing from ancient egyptians to medieval koreans or whatever.
One thing I wished they would have done for civ 6 (speaking of humankind stuff) is have a bit of a scouting/prehistory age prior to picking your civ, so that instead of picking carthage and ending up in the desert inland you could look around and say “hey, I have some mountains nearby, inca might be a good bet here”, or “lots of deserts, lets go Mali.”
What I want (but will never get) from a 4x game is a "realistic" historical setting (ie not overtly scifi or fantasy) that has no references to Earth.
I don't want to build the Great Wall of China in Germany. Been there, done that. Let me make my own faction and name my "big wall project' the Dashing Wall of Rather.
Humankind changing races during the game made every game feel samey. Lose it. The board-game VP earned throughout the game was good though --much better than farting around until the victory conditions open up in the endgame.
The title laying game of district adjacency is great, just don't have tiles where I can't lay tiles, and let me move them.
Some buildings have the "ageless" keyword attached to them. From context, I presume these buildings will maintain their functionality in later ages, whereas other buildings will become obsolete and need to be replaced with more modern equivalents. Jousting Arenas being replaced with Sports Fields, Amphitheaters replaced with Cinemas, etc.
Districts are no longer built separately from the first building that goes in that district. When the player chooses to make a Granary, they are automatically prompted to choose a location for their food district.
City States are now called Independents and seem to only take up a single tile.
The game has Civ: Beyond Earth style decision moments where the choice you make affects the customization options of your leader.
Booted this up as I was trying to see if I could get my wife into it. Not sure what has happened over the years but the game runs terrible now. Every click of the interface seemed to take 5 seconds or longer to register. Turning on any of the medium or high graphics options caused the game to just crash. And by turn 15, the game was freezing constantly on my wife. Couldn't alt-tab out of it, so she had to power down her whole machine.
We both have very good laptops (We both have 3070's), I can't see how the game this old could be this demanding. I never had issues when playing with friends years ago. Is this 2K launcher the same PITA as the one for Midnight Suns? Or is it something with this leader pass version?
The launcher absolutely fucked performance with Civ VI yes, just like Midnight Suns.
You can just look up the Steam launch options command to disable/bypass the launcher and that should fix it. It did for me anyway (for both games).
I kind of wish Firaxis would do some innovating themselves instead of just lifting stuff from Amplitude games. The changing cultures idea is neat but it wasn't even one of the top improvements Humankind had. Justice brings up a great point that moving between ages allows for pivoting which is really nice, but maybe that doesn't have to be tied to changing cultures? Maybe different heads of state are available for you to "elect" at the start of each age, so you don't have the odd culture mashup.
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Where I'm struggling with the Humankind additions is that I played Humankind, and I didn't find the "Choose Your Civilization Every Age" mechanic particularly compelling. It also felt artificial because you chose your civ from a list - it wasn't an intentional thing you drove towards. At least in that sense it looks like Civ is restricting/promoting your choices based on things you're doing in the game.
Re: Tactical combat
I think if Civ were to add something like this, it would have to be something like an autochess approach. Otherwise you run into way too many additional challenges that would blow up the scope of the game significantly, and also alter it dramatically towards the combat instead of the grand strategy.
The issue with humankind's civ changes was that it became annoying to keep track of who's who when moving ages.
I'm guessing that will be a problem here, too.
The civilization changes but your leader is permanent so that should help a lot, just gotta remember Octavian is a jerk-face instead of whatever their empire is currently called.
+1
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
The issue with humankind's civ changes was that it became annoying to keep track of who's who when moving ages.
I'm guessing that will be a problem here, too.
The civilization changes but your leader is permanent so that should help a lot, just gotta remember Octavian is a jerk-face instead of whatever their empire is currently called.
I want Octavian to wear Continental Army blues when you change from Imperial Rome to America.
Where I'm struggling with the Humankind additions is that I played Humankind, and I didn't find the "Choose Your Civilization Every Age" mechanic particularly compelling. It also felt artificial because you chose your civ from a list - it wasn't an intentional thing you drove towards. At least in that sense it looks like Civ is restricting/promoting your choices based on things you're doing in the game.
Re: Tactical combat
I think if Civ were to add something like this, it would have to be something like an autochess approach. Otherwise you run into way too many additional challenges that would blow up the scope of the game significantly, and also alter it dramatically towards the combat instead of the grand strategy.
It seems like that to a point, but the example of default progression doesn’t really make sense - Egypt to Songhai to Buganda? They don’t really have any connection
I feel like if they are going to do that they should do a more limited focus on defaults - have something like Ancient Egypt —> Ayyubids —> Modern Egypt or Gaul —> Franks —> France (just spitballing) as defaults then have some more limited single era civs you could unlock by “earning” like Mongols or USA.
Where I'm struggling with the Humankind additions is that I played Humankind, and I didn't find the "Choose Your Civilization Every Age" mechanic particularly compelling. It also felt artificial because you chose your civ from a list - it wasn't an intentional thing you drove towards. At least in that sense it looks like Civ is restricting/promoting your choices based on things you're doing in the game.
Re: Tactical combat
I think if Civ were to add something like this, it would have to be something like an autochess approach. Otherwise you run into way too many additional challenges that would blow up the scope of the game significantly, and also alter it dramatically towards the combat instead of the grand strategy.
It seems like that to a point, but the example of default progression doesn’t really make sense - Egypt to Songhai to Buganda? They don’t really have any connection
I feel like if they are going to do that they should do a more limited focus on defaults - have something like Ancient Egypt —> Ayyubids —> Modern Egypt or Gaul —> Franks —> France (just spitballing) as defaults then have some more limited single era civs you could unlock by “earning” like Mongols or USA.
Sort of limits your geographic spread. A little weirdness for more representation seems fair.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
+1
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited August 2024
"This makes no sense based on actual history" is, like, not a real criticism of any Civilisation game.
It never has.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Posts
Same with the early C&C games
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
As for wishlists, I would LOVE it if they finally let us make the same absurd demands of the AI that it makes of us. I want to be able to yell at my neighbor to fuck off with forward settling, or question that buildup of troops, and then have there be the same diplo consequences for them as for me. Very tired of that one way street.
Yep, also being able to pre empt things like religious conversion instead of waiting for them to convert a city.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
IF Humankind didn't do that weird psedo-real-time thing it does I would call it better than most modern civ games.
(1) claim areas of the map, in which case you mainly need it to be defensible and that can be done by troops
(2) claim a resource, especially a new kind, in which case the feeling of a "colony city" that has less infrastructure but is subsidized by imports from the mainland feels pretty thematic.
(3) produce a universal resource like gold or faith.
A little boost for (2) is appropriate and a specific boost for (3) like a special kind of temple you can build in new cities that is cheap for its output would be cool. I seem to recall there being some late game settler boost in Civ 6 but I might be confusing it with Humankind again.
I did like how humankind allowed you to build walls/etc that truly kept out invaders, had their own health, etc.
It really is a problem when you can win 90% of the time by abusing the AI on the battlemaps, but only win 20% of the same fights with autoresolve.
Civilization has always been in a weird spot between simulation and boardgame and in my opinion has stumbled the most when it tries to be everything to everyone.
Speaking of Simtex games, I enjoyed the MOO1 and MOO2 combat, but it works best with space combat where there is minimal terrain and not so well with ground based combat.
On a different topic regarding late game city development and infinite city crawl, something I've always like is the idea of transportation having more meaning over time. Early game, you can only bring materials in from the nearby area, but late game you should be able to build a resource extractor and tile improvements and link them up with specific cities. I recall one of the Civilization games allowing this (Civ 2, maybe?) and it always seemed like a good approach to take. Using this approach could make having some resources exhaust over time be feasible, if later technology allowed new deposits to be discovered and then linked up with your cities even if they are not located near the city.
Supply limits would have been a better solution to doom stacks IMO.
I feel like on thing is that maybe messes things up is that movement and range are so heavily restricted. I feel like a good bit of the time the ai either gets stuck in a traffic jam or sends its horseman way out in front and keeps archers and catapults way in the back so its forces don’t support each other.
Maybe moving infantry to base 2 movement, horse units to base 4, archers rage 3, while including zone of control/overwatch mechanics might make some sense?
Gladius AI seems to largely do find but it is a lot more fluid game.
The hexes can stay though.
In the case of religion, the option isn't available until a city is converted, or st least that's how it used to work
Civ4 has actually interesting SP games, I would like that to come back.
To follow this up, Civ scale works if you abstract it enough in your mind, though I think the game could help with this a bit.
A city isn't a city, it's a region. A mine isn't a mine, it's a mining town. The city center is not a town square and the industrial center a district of that city, they are both entirely separate cities in the metropolitan area. That doesn't work perfectly either but it's just a way of making it work in my head.
So I'm fine with the tactical combat if it's kept simple (ie not Humankind). Because I'm not picturing stationing my archers in Boston with some pikemen in Rhode Island to block them while they attack New York. I'm just picturing "tactically deploying specialized troops to utilize terrain and mitigate their weaknesses". With terms like "archer" and the dude on a map just being metaphors to make my brain understand and to make it more relataable than just dragging arrows around like Hearts of Iron or something.
We both have very good laptops (We both have 3070's), I can't see how the game this old could be this demanding. I never had issues when playing with friends years ago. Is this 2K launcher the same PITA as the one for Midnight Suns? Or is it something with this leader pass version?
Gameplay footage being unveiled.
EDIT: OK, sorta.
Highlights:
PC and Console at launch. Release date is 2/11/25
Leader and Civilization choice are independent (like unrestricted leaders always on)
Concept of a leader expanded so it's not just heads of state. Ben Franklin, notably. Hatshepsut was there. Amina, Napoleon, couldn't tell which Roman, Ashoka were the other ones I caught.
Ages, where your Civilization changes each age is the big new thing. Antiquity, Exploration, Modern, so three ages. Better able to balance civs because you've got unique stuff in every era. Can keep some of the old powers as you advance, but how that works isn't totally clear. You can always be a linked (loosely it looked like, Egypt --> Songhai for example) Civ, but can also become a Civ because of something you've done. Example they showed was having a certain number of horse resources in the Age of Antiquity lets you become Mongolia in the Age of Exploration.
Some Civs I saw: Egypt, Maurya, Mongolia, Rome, Songhai, I'm sure others will have stuff screenshotted.
Districts back, seems like cities sprawl even more. Might be hard to read? Looks pretty but possibly too much detail/clutter. My biggest worry coming out of that footage.
City states are here.
I think I saw a builder building a road again.
Chris Tin back to compose the opening theme.
Gwendoline Christie is your narrator.
Pricing: $70 base, $100 for Deluxe which gets you Tecumseh as a leader and Shawnee as a civ and some other bonus features, $130 for "Founders" which gets you Deluxe and it sounds like the first six DLCs and they're aiming for one a month. Deluxe/Founders also gets you five days early access.
One thing I wished they would have done for civ 6 (speaking of humankind stuff) is have a bit of a scouting/prehistory age prior to picking your civ, so that instead of picking carthage and ending up in the desert inland you could look around and say “hey, I have some mountains nearby, inca might be a good bet here”, or “lots of deserts, lets go Mali.”
What I want (but will never get) from a 4x game is a "realistic" historical setting (ie not overtly scifi or fantasy) that has no references to Earth.
I don't want to build the Great Wall of China in Germany. Been there, done that. Let me make my own faction and name my "big wall project' the Dashing Wall of Rather.
Humankind changing races during the game made every game feel samey. Lose it. The board-game VP earned throughout the game was good though --much better than farting around until the victory conditions open up in the endgame.
The title laying game of district adjacency is great, just don't have tiles where I can't lay tiles, and let me move them.
The launcher absolutely fucked performance with Civ VI yes, just like Midnight Suns.
You can just look up the Steam launch options command to disable/bypass the launcher and that should fix it. It did for me anyway (for both games).
I'm guessing that will be a problem here, too.
Re: Tactical combat
I think if Civ were to add something like this, it would have to be something like an autochess approach. Otherwise you run into way too many additional challenges that would blow up the scope of the game significantly, and also alter it dramatically towards the combat instead of the grand strategy.
The civilization changes but your leader is permanent so that should help a lot, just gotta remember Octavian is a jerk-face instead of whatever their empire is currently called.
I want Octavian to wear Continental Army blues when you change from Imperial Rome to America.
It seems like that to a point, but the example of default progression doesn’t really make sense - Egypt to Songhai to Buganda? They don’t really have any connection
I feel like if they are going to do that they should do a more limited focus on defaults - have something like Ancient Egypt —> Ayyubids —> Modern Egypt or Gaul —> Franks —> France (just spitballing) as defaults then have some more limited single era civs you could unlock by “earning” like Mongols or USA.
Sort of limits your geographic spread. A little weirdness for more representation seems fair.
It never has.