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Yeah okay that would be pretty great.
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May 14, 2020 02:57
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overmind2000 posted:The only way the reference could have been better is if it caused +1 unhappiness all cities except the one you build it in get +10 happiness, city you build it in gets -10 happiness e: effect ends if the city it's in dips into negative happiness
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May 14, 2020 03:33
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And the barbarians who raid the other civilizations, are they the ones who walk away from Omelas?
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May 14, 2020 03:54
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Kangxi posted:And the barbarians who raid the other civilizations, are they the ones who walk away from Omelas? the other civilizations are the children. We are their gods, everything we can do is unheard of, and yet we keep our fellow men wallowing in dirt and filth, scoffing from across dimensions as we leave them behind on a hollowed-out rock. This is why we kept the gold standard for so long, even when we passed material needs and could replicate basic matter at a whim; the Mongolians are libertarians
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May 14, 2020 04:12
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They hate us because they do not understand.
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May 14, 2020 04:17
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sincx fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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May 14, 2020 04:24
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Haha the civfanatics thread monitoring this one is kinda terrible and it seems that their attitude is "maybe these changes away from alpha/omega will placate them but hopefully they won't smell blood in the water and keep pushing"  e: also apparently anything but centrism is destructive 
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May 14, 2020 04:24
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Anticheese posted:Haha the civfanatics thread monitoring this one is kinda terrible and it seems that their attitude is "maybe these changes away from alpha/omega will placate them but hopefully they won't smell blood in the water and keep pushing" A thread made to comment on a thread that does a lot of commenting on the first thread is an ouroboros worthy of the transcendent era
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May 14, 2020 04:40
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Jossar posted:Sadly that is not the intended reference, even if it does make me wish the picture was Zoss surfing the Wheel instead: This is a few days late but I've reached the point in my playthrough where the Godwheel is a thing and it turns out that it's actually from Malibu Comics  Strange that we haven't seen more superhero things in the mod considering that we were a civilization of superheros for an era or two
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May 14, 2020 05:01
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So, what is the strength difference between a Stone Age unit and the best Transcendent (as of now?) unit? Could the old good spearman-vs-tank problem happen with stone thrower and multiverse thrower?
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May 14, 2020 06:57
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The pretty much insurmountable problems the mod faces is the inevitability of the exponential end of the Civ snowball paired with just how many bonuses they have to hand out by the nature of the game, coupled with just how long these games take. Each technology has to increase the numbers or add a mechanic, or it's pointless. They've got 72 techs/era, and vanilla Civ IV has ~90 in total. They run out of new mechanics by era 2 with unit size, all the city sliders are in play, as well as the new stealth system. Era 3 they hand out open water travel with their second tier water unit(*), which is when Civ IV does it, and unsurprisingly era 4 is the wall on which games tend to effectively end. Not just here, but in every LP I've hunted down across the internet out of sheer curiosity. Granted, they stretch their unstoppable map crushing snowball moment across 150-250 or so techs where Civ IV ends in maybe 50, but there's only so much that can be done. And it shows. After era 2 all that's left in new mechanics is Civ IV vanilla ones which involve being able to move units to new terrain types and make things with bigger numbers. For a mod that's 11 years old and one of the few with any devs at this point the normal expectation is to have a midgame and plenty of endgame and maybe running a few victory laps with some off the wall stuff. But I get why it's not moved, I get why all of that's undeveloped - the majority of the playerbase and I'd suspect the devs just never see it. They either win outright or declare victory having played 1500-2000 turns which is still something like 3-5 times the maximum length of an unmodded one on normal. But hey, anybody can make a theory about this kind of thing so how does it stack up with what's going on in the mod in terms of recent development? Here's a comment from April this year. I'm not posting any of these comments to mock them or anybody involved, by the way, anybody uninvested needs to understand that to get to playtesting this poo poo from era-loving-two you've got to go through something like 500 loving turns of game. You have to play a turn count equivalent to a full game of Civ IV on normal speed to playtest era two. quote:I'm atm happy with the way the Civics play out through the Classical Era. Yes there are some that could get a small tweak or 2 but not very many. Three. Thousand. Turns. Six games in pure turncount (Not taking into account the tsunami of micro this dumps on a player on top of Civ IV's existing mechanics) of play-until-time-runs-out regular Civ IV at normal speed. To get to the Atomic era in C2C. Halfway. Through. The tech tree. How 'bout their units thread? What's happening right now? quote:So for the CORE units so far, I've added and completed planning on pages for tags regarding: Year 11, fellow goons. They're persistent. But they probably ought to just delete the back half of the tech tree and call this caveman to capitalist. It'd be vaguely more manageable. (*) I'm sure somebody is going to read this and say "but wait, it doesn't get ocean travel so hah." It doesn't need to. Everything's accessible from sea in almost direct routes in every C2C map I've checked. Ocean travel is gratuitous. Complications fucked around with this message at 07:41 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 07:39
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It's pretty obvious that the biggest lie the devs tell is that this poo poo is actually going to be finished one day, yeah.
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May 14, 2020 08:50
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Stuff like crime units and espionage needs to get shifted out to the third or fourth Eras. All of this unit stuff seems extra gratuitous as well since there's not even a proper skeleton that goes from one end of the scope to the other. There's a lot os subsystems that want to be included, but the core facets of the game aren't even implemented properly to the very end. The post mentions AI fixes and frankly, that's extremely necessary. Base game AI is not bright and extending the scope of the game long past the original dev intention requires a more finely crafted AI to keep up with such a long game. It can't be too dominating or else it smothers the player in its crib and it can't be too passive or the Player does it instead. Catch-up mechanics usually help mitigate this as it lets the player keep pace as the AI flies ahead with what advantages it starts out with due to difficulty settings and conversely, it lets the AI be at least competitive against each other, but from this play through, they're pretty much worthless. There's a lot of other subsystems that seem to be involved and want to be worked on, but without a firm foundation, it's like putting alloy rims on a car, but all of the tires are flat. It's work for the sake of work and just a bit self-masturbatory. Obviously there's also an issue of design by committee which throws a spanner into the works, but that's generally solved by having a clearly focused target design and a plan for what the end result will look like without deviation or having scope creep festering throughout the project. Basically Project Management 101 stuff. Ostensibly, development should've started by expanding the base game stuff to the Transcendent era and making sure that the AI playing against a typical player can get there or close to it. Probably even before that is just adding the Space layer to the game and making sure that works with the base game and how it interacts with the "Earth" and then moving on with that. That's roughly the core structure of what a mod like this should be. I don't think it ever got there before they started adding other stuff that was secondary to the core goal. Of course, this plan means that the early game would drag very hard as players would have to scrape their way to even getting their first settler, but that's part of the point presumably. Once the core is settled, then filling out the bones of each era to make them interesting can happen. Civics are a funny thing though since, just looking at how they've progressed, they go from slightly linear expand out maybe one or two layers and then contract forever. It's not clear if there's an actual idea of how a given player is supposed to progress through them. If the current behavior is intended, then when they contract again, it should be clearly superior to all of the branches. If it's not, then there's something wrong. You don't need to playtest to understand that. That's fundamental design. The point of playtesting is to check if the numbers and programming actually work when hooked into the rest of the game and to make sure it's "fun" and "meaningful." It's otherwise just masturbation. Ostensibly, Civics should also roughly correlate to an intended era or set of eras as part of design planning and find themselves wholly obsolete, not by a tech forcing it, but because the more advanced Civic is a clearly better choice. Otherwise you get the loving Gold Standard thing basically being kept despite having researched techs that would presumably allow for infinite gold or whatever material the currency is pegged to. And this isn't even getting into the nitty gritty on the actual mechanics and stuff.
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May 14, 2020 09:57
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quote:Although similar to the Superhuman civic it seems really disconcerting to have the description contain such high and lofty goals and then have one of the wonders be Omelas. Why? The thing was a knock on the type of thinking of "It can't be perfect, what's the catch?".
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May 14, 2020 12:42
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Bloodly posted:Why? The thing was a knock on the type of thinking of "It can't be perfect, what's the catch?". It's another case of everything else in the tech seeming to accept that the premise is 100% true without irony. The rest of your civilization gets to have perfect utopias (well maybe not mechanically but description-wise) and you need never be troubled about the ethics of it all unless you need to build Omelas for completionism's sake. It seems like it would fit better at one of the earlier supercity techs, not the point when we should no longer need to make a child suffer for Utopia. Banemaster posted:So, what is the strength difference between a Stone Age unit and the best Transcendent (as of now?) unit? The units that we had at the beginning of the game were strength 1-2, maybe 5 at the end of the era. Units in Transhuman or so when the techs ran out were 220 or 290. Combined with all the combat mod multipliers that makes it difficult if not nearly impossible for old units to win, even in the best of circumstances. I've regularly had a single level combined organic infantry destroy whole Barbarian cities with fortified APCs without taking a scratch. And even uncombined they mulch anything premodern. Actually given that combination exists I will provide that one caveat: Maybe you can have Spearman beat Tanks but only if you throw the entire armies of Alexander the Great against a single squad of super soldiers. overmind2000 posted:This is a few days late but I've reached the point in my playthrough where the Godwheel is a thing and it turns out that it's actually from Malibu Comics. True, but it got eaten by Marvel and is now subsumed into their canon so I figured technically close enough. There was a little bit more superhero stuff, it just happened to fall on the "generic building" side of the axe or not worth talking about in detail. Mensiokinesis had a specific Superheroes Guild for instance. Same for there being a bunch of Final Fantasy stuff which was present, but never really interesting. Jossar fucked around with this message at 13:28 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 12:53
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Jossar posted:It's another case of everything else in the tech seeming to accept that the premise is 100% true without irony. The rest of your civilization gets to have perfect utopias (well maybe not mechanically but description-wise) and you need never be troubled about the ethics of it all unless you need to build Omelas for completionism's sake. There's a reason that Le Guin never asks Omelas itself to change; the challenge is to the individual who must actively accept this bargain if they are to live in bliss. Not a single person in Omelas is ignorant of this fact and must live with it. Would you walk away from Omelas?
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May 14, 2020 13:59
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I might be missing the point of Omleas because I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. Every major society ever has had castoffs who've suffered at least close to as badly as the 1 abused child from Omleas whether by abuse or neglect, so on a purely utilitarian level you're minimalizing suffering even ignoring the fact that in all other facets Omleas is supposed to be the ideal utopia.
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May 14, 2020 15:48
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If they moved it earlier they could have a tech that "obsoletes Omelas" which would own
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May 14, 2020 16:18
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Deki posted:I might be missing the point of Omleas because I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. Every major society ever has had castoffs who've suffered at least close to as badly as the 1 abused child from Omleas whether by abuse or neglect, so on a purely utilitarian level you're minimalizing suffering even ignoring the fact that in all other facets Omleas is supposed to be the ideal utopia. Its taking that concept to extremes - most societies have so many people suffering that its a statistic. Does putting all that suffering on one person fundamentally change the way you think about it?
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May 14, 2020 16:24
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Deki posted:I might be missing the point of Omleas because I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. Every major society ever has had castoffs who've suffered at least close to as badly as the 1 abused child from Omleas whether by abuse or neglect, so on a purely utilitarian level you're minimalizing suffering even ignoring the fact that in all other facets Omleas is supposed to be the ideal utopia. Having exactly one person suffer in the world is better then what we have now. But if you feel satisfied with that, why didn't you feel satisfied with the Omleas 0.9 that had exactly 2 people suffer and stayed there. And yes, having Omleas be appearing earlier and being obsoleted at some point is very much an improvement to the mod.
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May 14, 2020 16:57
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It's important to note that the narrator doesn't explicitly judge the persons in Omelas. Indeed, as I've noted, this is absolutely a no-brainer on a societal level. Most of us would acknowledge it, shove it into a corner of our brains and sleep rather soundly in our utopian beds. Does putting a face on that suffering make you more or less susceptible to "leaving Omelas?" And if so, because it's Le Guin and comparisons to our actual lived society are what really matters, then what are you going to do about the faceless statistical suffering right now? Or maybe you don't? Is it necessarily intrinsic? Why is the suffering of this child necessary? And since people can and do leave Omelas it means that perhaps that's not the only life that can be lived -- but that other life is as unimaginable as life within Omelas, so is that an actual moral improvement? The narrator neither praises nor scorns the leavers, only noting that they exist and that their destination is known only to them. Whether there is a "point" to Omelas, it's to question every aspect of it...and not necessarily come to a simple answer.
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May 14, 2020 17:21
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Devs: omelas must have +1 unhappiness. This is a must.
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May 14, 2020 17:49
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Complications posted:The pretty much insurmountable problems the mod faces is the inevitability of the exponential end of the Civ snowball paired with just how many bonuses they have to hand out by the nature of the game, coupled with just how long these games take. Each technology has to increase the numbers or add a mechanic, or it's pointless. They've got 72 techs/era, and vanilla Civ IV has ~90 in total. All true, but this is where I think the developers deserve credit for some very clever work on game mechanics. In vanilla Civ4 not too many buildings obsolete, they just are a required step in the building chain and keep providing their bonus throughout the game. C2C has an incredibly complex web of replacements. So an early building that gives say a small production bonus might get replaced with a new building that does the same or a touch higher rather than being cumulative. Not only does this work from a mechanics point of view, but "story-wise" it makes sense that a civilization that is advancing technologically but relying on aging infrastructure without upgrading will fall further and further behind (represented in game when the old buildings obsolete regardless if they have been replaced or not). Number creep is unavoidable with Civilization 4's engine, but they've done a surprisingly amazing job stretching that out over a vast number of tech improvements without letting a stoneman remain competitive with a tank. As an aside, I have also deeply appreciated that the sheer number of techs make advancement seem more gradual and organic than base Civ4. Further, it means I can trade or even gift technologies to other civilizations without feeling like I'm giving a massive disadvantage to myself. All too often in vanilla Civilization trading techs or even resources felt like it was more advantageous to deny the huge step up to enemy rather than get a mediocre payoff for your side. In C2C, making a mercantile empire is a perfectly feasible path to take. That said, while I'm talking about game mechanics, there are still some unbalanced elements. Even playing the newer C2C version, food production is way too easy; to the point that I have +130 size cites in the Atomic Age, especially by gaming certain corporations. Maybe a hard cap on how big a city can get in each era? That would incentivize players to use food merchants if it'll otherwise just go to waste in big cities. And money is absolutely useless by mid-Medieval Age if not sooner. At that point gold is coming in far faster than I could ever spend so build rushing everything including wonders is trivial. I recognize that's a harder issue to correct since you still need players to have a capable economy if their focus is elsewhere while not letting obsessive builders like myself break the game over my knee. Otherwise a war focused civilization simply has no strategy besides zerg rush or else the builder player can just buy a better army than anyone else if given even a little time to develop ten times out of ten. Perhaps some form of diminishing returns? Like an autobuild building representing opulent corruption that drags down your per turn income if your banked money gets over certain thresholds?
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May 14, 2020 17:50
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May 14, 2020 17:53
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My photo capture kind of blinked a few times throughout, so apologies for the Dropbox message showing up. But it’s the final update, so I’m content to call it here. Jossar's Playthrough – Transcendent 4   Manifold Colonization provides the three tile workable radius building for Distant Cities as well as a number of other buildings revolving around trying to cram as much as we can into limited spaces via use of advanced topology. Subdimensional Universe continues on this theme by introducing various kinds of pocket universes.  From there we move onto the ability to truly start cheating space once and for all, allowing for truly transfinite structures so long as they obey certain patterns.    And then we start cheating on the patterns themselves allowing for an increased degree of complexity in how we can create those transfinite structures.    This is manifested in certain projects that are just versions of what we’ve seen before, but now without limits…     And just straight up starting to blur the physical with the metaphysical altogether.   Reality Reprogramming allows for the construction of the final capstone economy wonder, though at this point it’s really just giving you the opportunity to perform a victory lap.   Some people were asking when we get to go back in time and create humanity. I’ll do you one better – we’re responsible via stable time loop for the creation of literally everything.   Not just in our own universe or physical realm, but all that ever was, is, and ever will be. Ascension Gate here is how you win a proper Science Victory. It requires literally every tech but the Future one researched and drains your population as everyone ascends to a higher dimension.   The Mongolians posted:OF COURSE THAT IS SOMEWHAT MEANINGLESS GIVEN THAT OUR ASCENSION WOULD NEVERTHELESS BE WITHIN THE CONFINES OF A COMPUTER SIMULATION   
Jossar fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 15, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 18:26
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Well, as long as they don't mass suicide to try to leave...
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May 14, 2020 18:36
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Also while I felt it was narratively appropriate to use the old version of the Simulation Analysis tech, I went back and updated the SVN and the new one looks like this:  Heaven also contains a comment on you not getting there if you do stuff like picking bad civics or nuking the Romans too much. Jossar fucked around with this message at 18:45 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 18:40
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sincx fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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May 14, 2020 18:50
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Yeah, unlike the slog back in Nanotech/Transhuman where the pattern is already established for the rest of the game there's at least something to occupy yourself with. After the first active bit in Transcendent and the occasional wonder, it's literally just "push end turn button" until the end complete with increasing beaker costs for techs and computer slowdown to make finishing it off even worse. I don't know how people keep coming back to this game even out of horrifying fascination. I did it once to see it was all about, once to let's play it, and i'm more than happy to never pick it up again. Jossar fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 14, 2020 |
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May 14, 2020 18:57
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Honestly, I've been just skimming the updates for a while now. The scope of what the mod wants to do and the things it's trying to describe are so vast that to me, it became meaningless. Just increasing levels of arbitrary numbers going up as you research whatever the gently caress which unlocks who gives a gently caress which makes more numbers go up (or down) and none of it seems worth interacting with beyond pressing on for an arbitrary tech victory.
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May 14, 2020 19:13
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Like a lot of 4X games, its designed for you to make your own headcanon as you play. Though given how light the tech descriptions are I imagine this bit wears thin. Still, I enjoyed the last few eras way more than the first few.
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May 14, 2020 19:22
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Thanks a bunch for this, I appreciate it. A shame my own LP stalled when it did but them's the breaks. I'll probably get back into the game farther down the line to see how all the planned space stuff shakes out, but C2C in general definitely is a "once every couple years" endeavor for me. We'll see how everything goes when the continuation of this LP shows up in 2023 or thereabouts 
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May 14, 2020 19:34
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Gotta leave the simulation to get the REAL Purestain Gold.
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May 14, 2020 19:51
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It feels like the last dozen techs would be tech victories in other games but somehow it keeps going. Like if you're already retroactively creating the universe and have a bootstrap paradox, then perhaps everything after that is superfluous?
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May 14, 2020 20:01
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kw0134 posted:It feels like the last dozen techs would be tech victories in other games but somehow it keeps going. Like if you're already retroactively creating the universe and have a bootstrap paradox, then perhaps everything after that is superfluous? But what does your population do after that?
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May 14, 2020 20:06
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You create a nice universe that serves a full breakfast all eternity. The everlasting Denny's except clean and well- staffed and serving excellent food. I know this is inconceivable but as the gods we are it is our sacred duty to dream the impossible.
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May 14, 2020 20:18
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sincx fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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May 14, 2020 20:19
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Gods don't kink shame, you know he's secretly wanting to jump that cook's spatula
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May 14, 2020 20:25
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That Science Victory was poorly thought out relative to the techs involved.
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May 14, 2020 20:37
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kw0134 posted:You create a nice universe that serves a full breakfast all eternity. The everlasting Denny's except clean and well- staffed and serving excellent food. I know this is inconceivable but as the gods we are it is our sacred duty to dream the impossible. That was 2 updates ago though. 
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May 14, 2020 20:40
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