3121

They’re Irish?

3122

“Buy Civilization 5, the follow-up to the smash-hit Civilization… you know what, never mind that.”

It’s really all about that number at the end. If this were called anything else, sure, judge it in a vacuum. But it’s Civilization 5, and it’s reasonable to expect a step forward rather than a step sideways.

Firaxis apparently targeted casual gamers and the uninitiated with this effort. That’s fine business strategy. But it is still a sequel in a franchise, and putting a premium on a new audience at the expense of your old audience, the one that made it popular in the first place, is obviously dicey.

Sullla’s review dovetails with a recent RPS post in an interesting way.

In that post, Kieron Gillen talks about the relative irrelevance of narrative spoilers to games. Mechanical spoilers, on the other hand – how a game works, gameplay the developers intended to be discovered and not disseminated – can hugely impact critical perception of a game. Another game which launched with suspect AI, Empire: Total War (apparently it couldn’t launch a ship) gets mentioned in the post:

It got quite a few good reviews – including, for shame, one of mine – until someone realised something: on release, the AI simply can’t “do” fleet invasions. For a game based in the age of sail, that’s fucking fatal. The computer couldn’t play the game you were playing.

The problem is… well, as a conquering, exploration and general piece of atmosphere, the game kind of works. You can go and fight battles and conquer the world. There’s a reason why the first reviewers didn’t notice it, and it’s because they’re just one mind playing a complicated game. When released, an enormous net-mind of gamers were put on the task, only one of whom needs to actually notice something for everyone to notice it – because they post on the net, and the cat’s out the bag. And the game becomes instantly worse for everyone who hasn’t noticed it yet. It’s a total mechanic spoiler. It’s almost impossible to play Empire after you’ve realised it, even if you were digging it before. And it was possible to dig it before…

Now combine that with Sarkus’ post. I’m not a Civ all-star, and it’s likely the AI wouldn’t seem as incompetent to me as it does Sulla… but the simple fact that it does disappoint Sulla means I’m disappointed, too.

For one thing, it removes one of the incentives to play a game – to master it – as it’ll only be fun as long as you inhabit a narrow band of the skill spectrum. For another, a game that relies on player ignorance to appear fun is not a good one.

You’d think programming an AI that provides acceptable challenge for that first sigma is a safe bet. After all, most players are in that bucket, so they won’t care about the fact that the six sigma wizards hate the game.

I guess the answer is to program an AI that can challenge a guy who’s spent thousands of hours playing and writing about it. Are you listening, Jon Shafer?!

3123

Yeah, my thing isn’t so much personality, like they had in Alpha Centauri, but just knowing what the hell they’re doing, and why. How are they building their Empire? Who’s squabbling, and more importantly, why are they squabbling? Are they securing resources? Have they run out of space to build? Seeing how your enemies are choosing Civics/Social Policies can help you to determine the direction they’re going in, and most crucially, can aid you in figuring out who your biggest threats are. Almost all the criteria I used to make diplomatic decisions, in the previous three iterations of this series, are absent here.

I dunno, maybe a player can blithely click through the centuries on Chieftain, roll over some Civs and feel like they got value for their shekels. Which is fine, if that’s what you want to do then have at it. But I feel like this version of Civ is seriously lacking the depth of the previous versions; couple the short bus diplomacy with the braindead tactical A.I. and it makes the game feel like a hollow echo of its legacy. It’s an okay strategy game, but I expect more from this lineage.

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Well I just saw one and it was cool. I had liberated Philadelphia for Washtingon a few hundred years ago to bring him back from the dead.

However he kept complaining about me building near him and picking on small countries so I declared war on him and enlisted neighbouring Venice to help out. They rolled in with a few pikemen and swordsmen and just after my archers had their ranged attack they took the city.

I think they’re going to raze it though.

3125

As a super Civilization fan all the review and player negativity about the AI has put me off buying Civ V for now. Civ IV was so good that I invested enough time in it to claw my way up the difficulty levels until I could compete with and even spot the flaws in it’s AI. I find my opinions on PC strategy game usually mirror Tom’s so I held off waiting for his verdict.

The two main things I was hoping for as improvements over Civ IV from Civ V was some smarter AI that could challenge me all over again and faster turn cycles during the end game. It sounds like I might have got the second but the first is going to need some time for an expansion, patch or modders to set it right.

City states and social policies seem like cool ideas, but not quite cool enough to get me to buy while Civ IV is still so evergreen.

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I think the negative impressions are just repeated more often than the positive ones, Dan. I love the game. I’ve been unable to think about much else since I got it.

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I’m not sure about faster turn cycles. Are you just speaking of what you needed to do to complete a turn? I don’t know how you played civ IV but I typically had 3-4 “stacks” (and possibly some units doing pillaging) - siege stack, knight stack, melee stack, and a utility stack for anything unexpected.

Here, I frequently have significantly more units to move. In my current game I’ve got 5 units managing the western front against [siam I think]. But I’m going to have double that along another front (where I expect more serious resistance. Suleiman must die). And that’s before I consider what to reinforce with from the western front I don’t know that turns are shorter, now.

3128

I’m actually starting to believe the -33% combat bonus in plains and grassland is an unintended bug. The UI text for marshlands speaks of a “significant” penalty for defending in a marsh - which, in practice, is the same penalty for fighting in plains and grasslands.

3129

Someone needs to photoshop Longshanks from Braveheart into this thread now, with the “Irish…” quote.

3130

Another vicious stereotype like that, sir, and we’re going to have words.

3131

Since games like Operation Crusader and Panzer General were running on single-core CPUs with something like 1/50th the processing power of a modern core, the answer is, well, unfortunately… yes.

Because for some insane reason despite having all those billions of operations to play with, current Civ 5 takes forever per turn, so no doubt any smarter AI will somehow contrive to use another gig or two of virtual memory and a billion instructions per unit moved.

There’s really no excuse for the time the game takes already between turns. It’s just bad core programming, really, which is par for the course these days. Given that as a basis, any improvement in AI effectiveness will no doubt take even longer.

But in theory – yeah, the turns could be practically instantaneous with vastly superior tactical AI.

3132

I certainly apologize. Can I buy you a drink?

3133

City states don’t always raze all cities.


Also, whats up with imageshack? It was ocne so easy and simple to upload stuff. Now I get “you are not registered” popups, and some links only link to reduced size pictures you have to click again…

3134

As a super Civilization fan all the review and player negativity about the AI has put me off buying Civ V for now. Civ IV was so good that I invested enough time in it to claw my way up the difficulty levels until I could compete with and even spot the flaws in it’s AI. I find my opinions on PC strategy game usually mirror Tom’s so I held off waiting for his verdict.

I’m usually reluctant to advise anyone to buy any game, because I feel terrible if they spend money on it and then dislike it. So, I don’t advise you to buy Civ 5, lol. For what it’s worth, though, almost every review has been positive except Tom’s, but you probably already know that. As for player negativity, people who dislike something tend to be more vocal; the polls over at CivFanatics indicate that most players like Civ 5. Someone also dug up the titles of posts when Civ IV was released – many complaints that it was inferior to Civ 3, that it emphasized graphics over gameplay, that the AI was dumb, etc.

Me, I like Civ 5. It certainly seems like Civilization to me. Sure, there are a few things I miss from Civ 4 – I kinda liked religion, and while I didn’t love health, I did like having resources of more “flavors” than what we have in Civ 5. But these omissions are more than compensated for by new features that I would really miss if I went back to Civ 4 now: city-states, social policies, hexes, one-unit-per-tile, the ability to “purchase” new city tiles.

In particular, Civ5 has that same “multiple ongoing projects” feel that keeps me up for “just one more turn.” What addicts me is that I’ve got several tasks I’m trying to accomplish at once, and I delude myself into thinking that I will stay awake just long enough to see the outcome of ONLY one. So I stay up a few more minutes to see what happens with X – but by the time X is resolved, I’m wondering what’s going to happen with Y and Z. Civ5 still has that multifaceted gameplay: constructing tile improvements, building Wonders and buildings, commissioning units, choosing research, fighting wars, engaging in diplomacy, bribing city-states, buying new city tiles, fussing with specialists, plotting grand strategy. In Civ 5, as with all its predecessors, any one of those things will keep me going for just one more turn.

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Ain’t that the truth. It’s not a long pause by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact that my i7 has to sit for a few seconds in the early turns just baffles me… or worse, the length of turns in Multiplayer. I really don’t know what the game is doing, but whatever it is, it’s not doing it well.

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I was referring to the ‘waiting for the AI’ period after you press enter. Sometimes in Civ IV, admittedly at it’s worst while using FFH2, I could be waiting up to ten real world minutes between pressing enter and being able to play the game again. This is despite me having a fairly fancy and recent Quad Core processor. Though having read some of the more recent responses maybe that isn’t much better in Civ V after all either.

That’s true, and normally I wouldn’t be that bothered; but this time all the negative points seem to be homing in on one of the main points I was hoping to see improved. I’m sure I’ll still pick it up at some point, it certainly hasn’t helped Civ V’s case that I recently found the enormous Nehrim mod for Oblivion :)

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Civ IV was bad for me at first (I couldn’t play large games when it first game out) but a patch later dramatically improved things. Civ V at release, for me, is definately better than Civ IV. But it’s noticeably worse than Civ IV, patched. The mileage of others will be all over the map, of course.

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I know of the solution of this problem: don’t read discussions on internet about the subject. If you are loving how a game feel, don’t read threads in forums that discuss the intricate internal rules.

You can do like with good books, once you finish a good book, you rush to wikipedia, and read the opinion of other people about the book, maybe disagree. It could be that the book everyone has read is different to the one you feel have read, that may open you to a new reread of the book… but I digress…

On the other part, wen these things happends in a multiplayer game, are integrated in the culture. Like bunnyjumping in Counter-Strike.

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Overall, the Civ5 engine runs much more smoothly on my system than that bloated unscalable pig of an engine that Civ4 used. But I agree that AI calculations seem to take inordinately long in Civ5, even when the AI shouldn’t have much to do.

3140

I have this weird dysfunction with the Civ games. I’ll start a game and play it hardcore that day for hours. I’ll come back to it a day or two later and have no urge to continue. I’ll just start a new game. I think it is a combination of wanting to start my next game better and me enjoying the world discovery phase better then when everything has been uncovered and it bogs down into the diplomacy/wargame part. I rarely finish a Civ game. Although I must say that now that the stack of doom mechanic is gone I am enjoying the combat a lot more. Am I weird or do other people go through that, too?