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The Lord Bude posted:I don't mind the stacking of support units with military units, but I hate the idea of the corps. It's going to be just like the stupid doom stacks of old civ games except you need a separate one for each unit type - it completely undermines the tactical aspect of the game when you're only moving two or three units around. The single unit system in civ5 revolutionised the game and made conquest fun for the first time in the series. FYI doom stacks were sub-optimal in civ4's warfare against human players who understand how to use siege units. Usually you're looking to spread out and choke off your opponent. The AI being able to throw a big stack your way was a big plus in making it marginally threatening.
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May 14, 2016 12:15
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I imagine attaching artillery to normal units is a way to get rid of ranged units which were a serious problem for the AI. That bein' said, while I think civ4's tactical combat isn't the most interesting, I don't think civ needs interesting tactical combat. I'd probably rather see war more abstract, not less, but I think going for even more abstract warfare would have to be in a different game series. It's too bad every loving 4x decides to do sci-fi/fantasy. In Through the Ages, while you can use obsolete units to fill out your tactics combinations, your tactic bonus is hugely less when you're mixing catapaults and tanks. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 17:47 on May 14, 2016 |
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May 14, 2016 17:45
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Groovelord Neato posted:it woulda been cool if we got an actual sequel to alpha centauri. Hey look its the game that started the trend of papering over trash mechanics with writing.
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May 14, 2016 21:52
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Gamerofthegame posted:not really tbh it was pretty unbalanced everywhere Also the writing and philosophy comes off as extremely dated and the idelogical caricature leaders don't do anything for me.
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May 15, 2016 01:48
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German Joey posted:You've probably only played vs AIs, which only know how to attack via a "Stack Of Doom" and are set up to only be attackable by a "Stack of Doom" (via free bonuses and units, behavior-limiters*, and an inclination to spam shitloads of defensive units) in order to hide the fact that it doesn't know what it's doing, yet still provide some resistance against a conquering player. I can assure you that trying to use SoD tactics when you're playing against humans is generally the worst tactic you can do. Yeah, literally the only advantage stacks of units have in civ 4 is that the best defender gets picked. That's it. Otherwise, the 1v1 combat makes it kinda meaningless where the attack comes from, so it's not really a fundamental flaw of the game to me. You just move in some catapaults if your opponent has a mega stack and get easy money. The game has a lot of mechanisms to attack stacks. Honestly, though, I don't feel civ needs more tactical combat- I would say it needs more abstract warfare, not less.
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May 18, 2016 00:48
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Jastiger posted:Adopt some Europe universalis style diplomacy and being back vassal states would be a good first step. It doesnt work when youre playing to win unless said vassals are specifically made for the purpose. If a playable country is in a position to be vassalized it should just be put out of its misery.
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May 20, 2016 15:24
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majormonotone posted:Micromanaging supply lines sounds like the opposite of fun Yeah, honestly tactical combat and logistics in and of itself are just not things I desire in a civ game. War should be a reflection of the other parts of the game, a reward for skilled diplomacy, building the right things, and preparation, not shuffling units around optimally. There are plenty of very good wargames out there.
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May 23, 2016 23:25
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Having recently played a game of civ 5 and finishing a diplomatic victory that required engagement with the city-states(I was playing CBP so it was a touch different), I would say that either the CSs need to be more like civs and be more flexible or they need to be less like civs, allowing their ally more control over their actions(e.g. controlling their troops when they're at war within some limitations). Right now they're an unhappy medium to me. I'd like to see some way to have cities that don't have any fine control- perhaps after the first few, you get minor cities that offer an averaged out yield of their neighboring tiles and extend the territory, allowing them to be fought over between civs but it's not a huge deal if they get taken. You could kinda play with it, how many major cities can a civ get- that could changed based on which civ, some having more, some having less. This way you could have big empires with lots of territory but not 10,000 city screens to go into to micro the citizens/change build queues.
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May 30, 2016 11:38
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Honestly i'd rather see more civs than more leaders for existing civs.
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May 30, 2016 14:13
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I could see a game like civ where empires are expected to fall in the middle of a game work if it were like SmallWorld/Vinci where you jumped into another country to try to score more points when your old one had run its course- that'd let you make the dynamics a lot more harsh and possibly untenable.
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May 31, 2016 04:35
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AG3 posted:The GUI and color scheme is giving me some serious flashbacks of Stardock's game Elemental for some reason. It's the way the fog works and the font of the text.
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Jun 3, 2016 11:32
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When you add any kind of customization you're going to get optimization, not differences. Making religions have powerful sets of different benefits as a package would probably work better than just picking and choosing the optimal ones and not playing the game. Having most of the religious benefits feed into the faith mechanic is probably one of the factors making it very binary though because faith is pretty worthless without a strong religion that you're benefitting from. It's the same reason the custom race designer in moo2 isn't very interesting- it tends to create Creative super races rather than interesting things with real strengths and relevant weaknesses. It's why Stellaris doesn't work.
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Jun 5, 2016 12:15
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There are already penalties for emphasizing religion: opportunity costs.
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Jun 6, 2016 14:29
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The civ4 stacks offered literally no combat benefit other than picking the best defender.
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Jun 20, 2016 15:47
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I don't know, I think people ascribe way too much to process when I could just say Jon Shafer made some bad design decisions. His new game is interesting, though.
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Jun 23, 2016 02:03
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Making empires break apart is just a fail state for human players and is easily avoided with any skill in the mods that include it. I think catering to the roleplayers is just a bad idea.
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Jun 26, 2016 05:20
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:It's true, Civ is not primarily a simulation game, but it kind of markets itself as one. I mean, it's historically themed and since almost everyone who tries to make this sort of game goes with a sci-fi/fantasy theme it's easy to associate the historical theme with marketing as a simulation. StashAugustine posted:Which is weird since to me EU4 is a better 'competitive' game than Civ 5 That's more because civ5 just isn't very good as a game played by humans. To be fair, competitive civ is really off-putting to people because it's a very cut-throat, early war focused game since that's the most profitable way to win a civ game.
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Jun 26, 2016 14:54
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CalvinandHobbes posted:I wonder though if players recognizing the empire breaking apart as a fail state isn't the point of using it as a game mechanic? If empire cohesion is used as the counter to ICS and players adjust their strategies accordingly, then it will have been effective even if players are able to avoid their empires breaking apart. It also throws a bone to the roleplayer faction (who are certainly not the majority but probably a decent subset) and is certainly more lore friendly than your entire empire being unhappy about that new territory you claimed and refusing to work until you get them more marble. It seems like a bizarre way to counter ICS and an overly complicated system that adds nothing if that's the point of it. The happiness penalty for ICS is a problem with global happiness as a mechanic more than anything else. Gabriel Pope posted:Also, in a more nuanced game breakaways might not be an entirely bad thing. This probably won't happen in Civ since at its core it's a very basic 4X with relatively straightforward ideas about power and control. But in you could conceivably have, for example, a system where amicably letting colonies go gives you an extra-close ally or even satellite state that lets you get some of the benefits of that territory (via favorable trade and diplomacy) without the overhead of administering and defending it yourself, making it strategically viable to allow and even plan for some territories to split off. Civ really isn't that kind of game at all and it would never really be optimal against micromanagement in a normal 4x. If the late game slogs are to a point where you want to make puppets to deal with it, the solution is cutting down the level of management, not adding some weird automation to make it work.
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Jun 27, 2016 01:32
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Ghostlight posted:Correct. This is something both IV and V already do because the alternative is Infinite City Sprawl. There are ways to make ICS less efficient without making convoluted things that require you to give away parts of your empire to AIs. I mean, what's proposed for colonies is literally a "create vassal" button. Honestly, though, there are ways one could make it so you could have an empire sprawl without making it a management mess which would have beneficial effects on the game, too. Something akin to "minor cities" which provide benefits but don't have the a seperate city management menu, but they still expand your territory and such. This would allow empires to have some buffer zones to fight over that don't necessarily wreck each other. In this case, allowing expansion wouldn't introduce a huge amount of micromanagement and would allow more of a gentle civ4 style solution to ICS, which was basically a penalty that lifted as the game went on. Most of the civ5 design decisions legislating out tons of cities were designed with the late game hell of civ4 in mind, but they struck me as approaching it the wrong way. Instead of making late game management easier by changing the nature of the way cities worked, they just legislated it out in the game mechanics.
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Jun 27, 2016 11:17
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:If a 4x balanced around ICS I think it would be cool If you changed the way cities work it could work but 4x games tend to focus on zany sci-fi/fantasy settings and roleplaying poo poo over trying to find good mechanics.
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Jun 29, 2016 19:34
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Rexides posted:Maybe that's the point of 4X, reach a level of power that makes everyone else's efforts pointless, and either keep playing just to gloat over your puny opponents, or start a new game. The mechanical victory conditions are there just to pin down a logical end to the game if you feel you need one. Gripping end-game battles are for level-based games. Most of the good board games are designed so that a victory condition hits while the game is still in question. It's the only way to really do it, IMO. Otherwise you spend turns going through the motions. And yeah, the first 100-200 turns are the ones that are playtested and well thought out and tend to be the interesting turns of a 4x game. The last 400 are just mopping up.
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Jun 30, 2016 11:49
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loving Russia and not Tannu Tuva?
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Jul 13, 2016 11:57
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StashAugustine posted:How much does it change the core gameplay, I seem to remember a revamped happiness system? They revamped happiness and upped tile yields considerably. This makes the game even easier than it was because this is something the human player tends to leverage better.
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Jul 25, 2016 02:38
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Rexides posted:Combat AI is supposedly better, but AI resource bonuses are spread throughout the eras, so the early game is significantly easier. That is, you can actually get a religion and maybe a wonder or two even on higher levels. The combat AI is better, but not by a lot and the human is even more capable of taking a huge lead given the improved tile yields.
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Jul 25, 2016 23:54
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mitochondritom posted:Its funny how much "inspiration" you can take from a competitors title without acknowledging it at all. Even a cursory "We looked at recent titles in the 4x genre and saw a lot of innovation and it made sense to translate that into Civ" would be nice. As it stands these meet the dev videos where they say "oh we planned this unstacking cities from civ V" just seems cringey. Endless legend is a poo poo game so seeing good mechanics ported into a hopefully less poo poo game is good. Who cares about that kind of bullshit anyway, anyone can dream up features.
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Aug 3, 2016 12:14
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Baronjutter posted:As someone who totally ignores victory conditions and just enjoys playing and seeing what narratives form I just want the AI to behave like other countries. I wish we were much more beholden to our people or internal groups and their opinions and the direction we took out countries was much more based on that rather than some pre-planned optimal victory strategy. Like going to war with a long time ally would get your people extremely upset, betraying a country you have rich trade ties with would see your merchant/capital class potentially revolt. I guess I'd just love to see more eu4/paradox style diplomacy and internal politics where everyone is guided by their own politics and goals rather than meta-game level "victory conditions". Civ is not for dumb narrative players, leave that narrative bullshit to Paradox games. Civ is a game where you Play To Win The Game.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:37
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I Play to Win the Game in single player. I just jack up the difficulty as needed and have fun that way.
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Aug 6, 2016 02:03
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Ghostlight posted:It sounds like you're really bad at playing to win. A proper natural intelligence should recognise that the optimal strategy for winning the game is to play on Settler. Touche.
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Aug 6, 2016 11:02
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Rexides posted:Ok, it could be a bit more engaging than Spreadsheet Championship, but it's definitely the direction civ should take. It always struck me as odd that military operations were basically a totally different game from the rest of the game.
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Aug 8, 2016 22:56
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Powercrazy posted:Well "fun" is subjective, but I don't see what "the best defensive unit defends" has to do with that. Seriously, that was literally the only reason to stack units in civ4. Otherwise it was sub-optimal to expose units to more collateral damage than necessary by stacking up.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:27
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echinopsis posted:Go full planetary annihiliation and make it a god drat geodesic sphere Because spherical maps are not really good in a gameplay sense and the gimmick made planetary annihilation annoying as gently caress to play.
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Aug 15, 2016 22:25
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Glass of Milk posted:I've always thought that they should make tiles be more productive as you progress technologically, so you could eventually found viable settlements in previously uninhabitable places. Founding settlements is almost never worth it later in the game. There are games that have this kind of mechanic and it's kinda bad unless cities don't improve that much from when they start(see moo1). I guess you could make swamps, deserts, and tundra amazing tiles that kickstart a city to being really good but that seems a bit hokey.
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Aug 16, 2016 01:13
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echinopsis posted:it's actually fine, it's not really a gimmick for a world war simulator to be played on something that actually represents a world Losing half of your screen space to useless space while not being able to have a useful minimap and making scrolling tricky while making the edge of the map you do get to see pretty useless due to the angle is a big gameplay/interface problem.
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Aug 16, 2016 10:35
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StashAugustine posted:Out of curiosity is Civ 4 Colonization worth playing? It's a revamped version of colonization that's a bit harder but also clunkier. It does have some insane mods and if you get it cheap it's worth trying them out.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:47
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cheetah7071 posted:Colonization is fun but it suffers from the fact that it's an economic simulator which has a military win condition It's a weird dichotomy but it works okay it's just the military win condition takes way too long to actually play out. It does make the game a micromanagement mess.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:50
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If you're trying to ape SMAC you're going to get a poo poo game because SMAC was a poo poo game.Darth Windu posted:The best game In the series was Civ Rev and you're dumb if you think anything else Civ Rev is a really really good idea for a game but every 4x maker wants to make their retarded sci-fi/fantasy game.
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Aug 30, 2016 01:22
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I think transparency makes for solid gameplay and hiding poo poo so you have to micro spies is the definition of tedium.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:33
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sarmhan posted:Hidden information is a core part of almost every game though. If spies take too much micromanagement that's a problem itself, but not knowing exactly what the opposition is doing is not a flaw. Hidden info is the kind of thing to be used specifically and sparingly. Twilight Struggle does not show you your opponent's hand, but there's enough info, especially after turn 1 to make reasonable guesses. It does not try to obfuscate the board state.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:42
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:Eh, I think this is part of what made Beyond Earth less popular or engaging with a lot of people. I think are people posting a lot about their opinions here are because they like and are invested in the game. They wouldn't post about the Pan American Union because nobody cares. Also, if you think the opinions in this thread are insufferable, click around on video game discussions else where because man, this is pretty tame. Honestly it seems like devs of 4x games are afraid of making games about the real world due to some existential fear of sperglords. What i'm saying is civ needs some competition.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:51
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:How do you feel about the fog of war, then? That hides a lot of info, and players often resort to micro-ing scouts to fogbust barbarian camps and keep tabs on enemy armies. The scouting phase of civ is more busy work while you have one city and one thing building at a time so you don't just have to mash end turn. The point of the fog of war in the beginning is mostly to prevent information overload and give the scouts something to do. Honestly the unrevealed map is one of the less good forms of hidden info because you're mostly just guessing which direction is good. There's no info, really, so you might as well just roll a die. I don't think realism is really that important. I like seeing the enemy units because it allows for informed decisions(and informed decisions are the interesting ones) and seeing the enemy development for similar reasons. The fog of war to me would be like if Twilight Struggle had the influence numbers on each country hidden because "the real nations didn't know how much influence they had in a country" and it would make a much worse game.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:35
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