Curious how the art style holds up to the kind of cuts necessary for the Switch. Guessing the buildings end up looking a fair bit like Civ 6.
In our age of upscaling technology and general slowdown of graphical tech improvements there’s no reason for a modern game to not run on older hardware like Switch. Nowadays Ultra settings in most games are barely distinguishable from medium ones, and in a strategy game where you don’t really care about ambient occlusion or complex shadows it’s a matter of tweaking the settings.
They showed it on the Nintendo Direct and it looks a bit like Civ 6 on Switch with some Civ 4 graphics thrown in.
OUCH!
I dunno, it looks much better than I thought. It’ll probably limit zoom?..
It’ll absolutely look fine on the Switch handheld screen too, especially zoomed out.
Potato McWhiskey has an annoying habit of repeating simple statements over and over. But he has some interesting opinions about the good and bad points of the game at this point.
As a positive, he is especially interesting early on about the possibilities of the new system Independent People, which replace both City States and Barbarians.
One negative he gets into is the lack of leveling up units. (Only leaders level up.)
Historically the performance issue with 4xs hasn’t been the graphics, for the most part. It’s doing all the AI for a zillion units in the late game, leading to long AI turns. Hence cutting down on map sizes for the Switch: there’s less room for cities, hence (probably) fewer units. Also smaller maps means fewer hexes to think about when deciding on a move.
Also historically Firaxis has been terrible in that regard. I understand Civ6 turn times are still limited by animation, no matter what your configuration is, so the turns take much more time than they should. There are plenty of 4X games with more complex rules and significantly smarter AI and they only need seconds to compute everything on systems where Civ6 needs minutes.
I think graphics is part of the problem for the Civ series if not for 4x in general. Not in terms of high polys or fancy shaders or anything like that, but each of those myriad end-game units has to move from hex A to hex B. Only one unit moves at a time and it take a finite amount of time to run all the animations to execute the move, and for whatever reason the game just refuses to skip them. And then you factor in the fact the AI refuses to let any unit sit under any circumstances but moves every last one even with no goal in mind…
I hope the loading units onto commanders thing to move as one stack helps there and is more than just a gimmicky sort of deal.
Since I found the Civ VI soundtrack great, got a smile out of this:
Shafer has thoughts
any cliff notes for those of us who can’t listen?
Two Hours of Gameplay with commentary from a team of devs. I haven’t finished it yet, but they promise it will end by showing us the full transition to the second age and what that looks like.
I just came here to post that video! It’s a pretty good look at all of the early gameplay stuff. Definitely different from any other Civ and definitely a lot that feels, erm, borrowed from competitors. But all into its own unique mix! The age transition wasn’t quite as huge as I imagined it could be, but it’s hard to get a sense without playing through it.
The one thing I really wanted to know about the age transition they didn’t show during the age transition, but then they covered it during the 15 minute Q&A at the end of the video. That was how this map change worked. So from what they said, everyone starts in a single landmass. Then when Exploration Age hits, the map expands by adding other land masses.
At some level, this does make sense, but it also does seem to limit the map variety a lot. I think it means that doing a full (all three era) playthrough, you have to play continents only map styles. I suppose if they distinguish coastal waters and ocean tiles as they usually do, you could have Antiquity Era as a cluster of islands connected by coastal waters and surrounded by ocean tiles assuming no Antiquity Era ships which can go over an ocean tile.