3861

I don’t think TBS on PC is dead/dying at all. I suspect like you do that 2K won’t allow proper support, unless they can do console-style milking of the game- which will be a sore spot with the fanbase.

I’m thinking that TBS games may be a genre that isn’t best handled by large publishers anymore though.

3862

I dunno; Civ V is still selling well, and they’ll want to maintain that.

It makes sense for 2K to patch the game enough to keep people interested in it. Sure there will be DLC along the way, but apart from that they want people engaged and playing it, so they can crank out a couple of expansions that sell well, as was done with Civ 4.

And in that vein, the real maintenance for Civ 4, and likely for Civ 5, will be from the modders who go through it bit by bit, once the full dll SDK is released. That’s where the majority of AI tweaks and balancing came from, and likely will again. If anything, it will be easier to utilize the modders this time around, with everything running through Steam; Firaxis can take a look at what mods are most popular, and use that as a basis for further patch work, if applicable.

3863

Oh, I don’t think TBS on PC is dying, either.

As a matter of fact, I think there is more interest in them now than ever before, particularly with Civ thanks to Firaxis’ efforts with CivRev on both the consoles and handhelds (including Apple’s).

I just think the current “wrapper” that PC Civ is made in has outlived its usefulness, both business-wise and in the futile ability to satisfy long-time Civ players.

The move to Facebook with Civilization Network I think is the only way to ensure new and renewed interest in Civ as a franchise.

“Civilization” is such an iconic game, both in name and in gameplay that to try to continue to meet the demands of the extremely vocal veterens would be a disaster.

Let’s face it. While I’m sure the Firaxians genuinely love making Civ and want to put out a good product, they are ultimately a business and have to make profit.

Civ Network (and perhaps a CivRev2) I think will do this.

I suspect like you do that 2K won’t allow proper support, unless they can do console-style milking of the game- which will be a sore spot with the fanbase.

That’s why perhaps, for the 2K angle, CivNet & CivRev2 would be great.

If they build it upon all the things that went right with Civ V (hexes, city states, etc…), and reprioritize their customer base focus (meaning putting the diehard fans on the low end and the folks who just recently discovered Civ up front), I think we won’t have to worry about not having new Civ for a long time to come.

I’m thinking that TBS games may be a genre that isn’t best handled by large publishers anymore though.

I think you are right, at least in terms handling TBSs in the “wrapper” as mentioned above.

Well, I hope they just concentrate their patches on fixing what needs to be fixed in terms of their vision of what Civ V is supposed to be and not what everyone else wants it to be.

As for expansions, historically the first Civ expansion always seemed to introduce more problems, both technically and gameplay-wise.

If they make one, I hope they make it with a goal of it being the “final” one and take their time about it.

I doubt this will be the case, though, as real-life economy and corporate AI and happiness is broken, ironically mirroring what is supposedly going on in Civ V itself…

And in that vein, the real maintenance for Civ 4, and likely for Civ 5, will be from the modders who go through it bit by bit, once the full dll SDK is released. That’s where the majority of AI tweaks and balancing came from, and likely will again. If anything, it will be easier to utilize the modders this time around, with everything running through Steam; Firaxis can take a look at what mods are most popular, and use that as a basis for further patch work, if applicable.

I hope so.

Best case scenario (for me) would be a released SDK that will let you change anything and everything and modders going wild.

Actually, I think a fully-accessable SDK will ensure sustained sales of Civ V better than any patch, DLC, or expansion would…

3864

Played some again last night and had fun, though I can foresee my play-time dwindling until the game gets patched up. Started off as the Americans and quickly built 5 or so cities in a very defensible area. I made the City-State behind my lines my ally and then built up my forces to take on Elizabeth.

Between she and I there was some very defensible terrain, with lots of hills and some mountains. Unfortunately, she didn’t throw up any defenses prior to me crossing the hills. As such, I was able to rain destruction on her from the hilltops and easily took her 4 cities with the loss of only 1 unit. She didn’t have much of an army and couldn’t have stopped me anyway, but she could have made it much more difficult. So my victory wasn’t nearly as epic as it should have been.

I’ll finish out this game, simply because the position I’m in is pretty interesting. I have a good lead and can defend my empire easily with the exception of one of the English cities. Still, I desperately need some new happiness resources and I have to get my economy back on track. So much to do…

3865

Right now I’m playing Elisabeth on an archipelago map at King difficulty. I wanted the Domination Victory achievement and I don’t find it a walk in the park. I started on a lousy island and couldn’t expand beyond two cities before I was able to cross deep water. That makes things rather difficult.

While I do have the best ships, the others are certainly building some.
However they fail to screen their invasion forces, so if you find them before they land, they’re easy to sink.
I managed to end my war with Japan and India after leaving Japan with just a small small island colony… after eating the 9 cities offered for peace my happiness was -49, my bank 0 and my income negative. While slowly fixing that Arabia, India and Greece declare war… with my army losing one unit a turn and having negative modifiers due to happiness, I’m not doing too good.

It’s still very heavy handed diplomacy with few nuances, but the game is a challenge.

3866

Trading Posts are so ugly. They got rid of ugly road sprawl and introduced ugly trading post sprawl. In fact I think the reason trading posts look bad is because each one is covered in a network of roads! Replace them wih Civ 4 style villages.

Tony

3867

/agree

Which is too bad, since the other art assets look pretty darn good.

3868

I managed the Bollywood achievement on King, though I had to try again after the awful no-rivers start. It’s challenging, because the other empires will go to war either with you or with the city-states that are vital to your food or culture. They need to make the “pledge to protect” a defensive pact, because right now everyone reacts like you’re the bully when you declare war to save a client state.

The tough part is that after you go to war, you can’t take any of their cities, so they’ll just field another force a few years down the line. In the late game I had every empire on the planet declare war on me because I looked “weak” to them, regardless of my tech advantage. Eventually I hit on the tactic of gifting Mech Infantry to some of my more aggressive client states, and once I eliminated the enemy armies and softened thier cities, the client states took the enemy cities and burned them. They’re erratic about it though, some simply stopped doing it, some wouldn’t start, so you can’t count on a given City State helping you out this way.

The timeline ended up very similar to my other culture wins, unlocked the Utopia project in the 1920’s, though with just a few big cities I built it a good deal faster. I found that deliberately optimizing one city to produce Great Engineers was helpful, though doing so is slightly tough since the engineer-slot buildings tend to be mid to late game.

3869

Yeah, while you can’t really count on the city states, and their usually outnumbered army is greatly hampered by the crappy tactical AI that affects both parties in that case, gifting units is a great mechanic.
I tend to try and protect my allied CSs by gifting them at least one Battleship.
Sometimes they move it away to conquer the seas (and immediately lose the Battleship in the process), but ofen they park it in their city radius, where it serves as excellent all-purpose-defense-artillery.
I which you could also gift units to allied actual civilizations - or ally to them in the first place. But I disgress.

In my last game, I had heaps of fun gifting a couple of my client states Giant Death Robots and watching them go at it. They actually manage to keep those alive for a while.

One observation I made is where you guys are getting at with your “tech flies by in the late game” statements. I always had reasonable tech speed in my first few games, but it always took me ten or something turns to research a tech. I found the reason for this was me sticking with the Piety tree. The Reason tree is just SO powerful when it comes to boosting science…

After that game I finally started playing some serious modded games.
One thing I’d highy recommend everybody is the “Improved Tile Yields” mod, which raises output of some terrain/improvement types, with a focus on boosting production.
Using that it’s actually possible to get some stuff to the frontline before it’s long obsolete, at least in the earlier ages.
I made some manual adjustments such as doubling the GP improvement outputs and assigning some specific output to the natural wonders, but even vanilla the mod definately improved my enjoyment of the game.

rezaf

3870

I really enjoyed playing with city states in my last game (on Prince as Egypt, large Earth map), and I decided late in the game to go for a diplomatic win since this was the first time I explored the Patronage policy tree.

At one point, Elizabeth attacked Kuala Lampur and over the next bunch o’ years I gifted the city state three relatively useless (to me) units (like a Knight, Cannon, etc). I was friendly with Elizabeth but I didn’t want her expanding too much more or taking out my friends/allies, and I needed to control my unit maintenance since I was being gifted more up-to-date units by Edinburgh and Hanoi. Next time I checked in on Kuala Lampur, they had taken two of Elizabeth’s cities as puppets! One of those cities was being constantly bombarded by four or five Ship of the Line’s that I watched, via my battleship, zip back and forth between an English island colony and the target city. Fortunately for Kuala Lampur, the silly AI wasn’t sending any ground troops to actually take the city, so they were just trading blows. Still, it was an interesting outcome, especially since Elizabeth was my main competition in winning this particular game.

The bonuses to culture and science, and the frequent great people being gifted really made city states stand out in this particular game.

3871

You made it too hard on yourself. Only the number of cities at the time of victory counts for the Bollywood achievement, so you could have simply given away or razed any excess cities. :)

Speaking of achievements, did anyone get the Magellan achievement? I sailed around the world any number of times but never got it. Do you have to be the first one or something?

3872

I wasn’t sure if I’d hose myself if I ever had 4 cities at one time. Certainly it’s a lot easier if you can take cities and raze them. Since the AI players are completely untrustworthy, I can’t see gifting the cities away.

Speaking of achievements, did anyone get the Magellan achievement?
Nope. I think it’s bugged. It certainly doesn’t care about first, because I’ve been first many times. When playing on King, I typically had Caravels long before any AI player.

3873

City states are fun when you have a tech advantage. It appears (not sure if this is true) they they stay up to date with your tech as a player, so it’s amusing to see some hapless AI attack a friendly city-state with catapults and crossbows and to see riflemen popping out in response.

It’s also nice to just finish researching chemistry or something like that and to be immediately gifted with a cannon that would take 10 or 15 turns to build. Almost makes up for the times you are fighting in some late era and for some idiotic reason they give you a scout. Undoubtedly there is some logic like “give the most advanced unit of a random class” and one of the classes is “recon”. Another almost characteristic example of sloppiness in the release.

3874

So, I guess we’re getting the Mongols DLC for free and Babylon DLC for $4.99 next week (Oct.25). I’d rather have a patch, but I’ll take what I can get.

3875

Oh, did they release that info? I haven’t spotted it yet. More civs is good (I already have Babylon); I like the variety.

3876

I wish they would at least get the next bug fix patch out sooner rather than later, even if that means waiting a little longer for a larger “make the game better” patch.

3877

Mongols! It must of course be our good friend Genghis. As soon as that is available, I’m starting a new game with him and totally ravage China.

3878

Not sure how it works, but I can confirm that both the “Bollywood” and “One to rule them all” achievements work even if you conquer and raze cities. Did it in my game as India to curb Siams power and his tendency to attack my city state allies. Simply attacked and razed all his cities except his capital which I left alone.

An odd thing in this game was that after I had razed his entire kingdom Siam quickly resettled and rebuildt, while Siams other neighbour (in addition to me), the Iroquis that only had one city the entire game, never used the chance to move into the vacant area left by those razed cities. AI-personality maybe?

3879

City states always get the most advanced tech of any player. I think that’s in the manual somewhere.

3880

Where did you see that? Anyway, I already have Babylon so free Mongols are good!