That means you don’t suck at Civ. Don’t be childish. Civ5 isn’t in the middle of Steam’s top 10 most-played games, week after week ever since its release, because everyone hates it. The Civ5 AI is certainly not smart, and it’s obviously too weak for your play style and level of ability, but that’s demonstrably not a huge issue for everyone.
What Chris said.
Perhaps “it’s fun” is just a shorthand instead of repeating all the arguments about what does work in Civ V, what was improved since IV and what we like about it making the not perfect AI a smaller issue to us.
It’s not like you’re really articulating your point in that much detail either when your side is speaking in absolutes and sweeping generalizations.
“The AI is broken. The AI is the most important aspect in the game. Thus the game is broken” is just as lazy as “but we’re still having fun”.
Not… really. “Fun” is contentless beyond the fact you’re enjoying something. I mean, good, you’re enjoying it, but there isn’t much basis for dialogue there. “The AI is broken” gives you a starting place to say that it isn’t or why it isn’t or why you think it’s good enough or why the AI isn’t that important…
…I think there are a lot of ways to play a game like Civ, and not all of them depend on having a good AI to go against. A lot of people do just enjoy figuring out how all the rules work and building a big empire and the role-playing aspect of decking out your civ in all the coolest gear/techs. But… if you want to play something as a strategy game, formulating a plan of action and trying to put it into practice and responding to your opponents reply to that and so on… you need to have a capable opponent. For people who enjoy that aspect of strategy gaming - for whom that pretty much is the defining quality of what a strategy game is - then knowing the standard of the AI is important information. Whether the reviewer enjoyed the game in spite of (or because of) the dysfunctional AI is also something I want to know, but it’s less important than knowing that the AI can’t play the game. A reviewer telling you a game is “fun” or “not fun” isn’t very useful unless you happen to know there a perfect coincidence between their opinions and yours.
But that’s not the argument at all.
No reviewer is saying that. I agree with you… it’s Toms age old argument against the word fun, and there’s nothing new there.
What I actually said was that perhaps the use of fun here on page 121 of a thread was shorthand instead of repeating all the arguments for what we found great about Civ V. Great enough to compensate for the lacking AI.
I’ll repeat one argument, though.
Apparently a lot of us suck enough to have difficulty beating the current AI above Prince level, so even though the AI isn’t challenging enough for the grognards it’s not so broken, that’s it’s ruining the game for everybody else. So I don’t even agree with the premise that the AI is unable to play the game at all.
But it’s not like I don’t want a better AI - especially a better diplomacy game would make my day. And I’m not currently playing Civ V, so something is missing for me too (but it might just be time played - I didn’t play Civ IV vanilla either after this time). I’m just disagreeing with the hyperbole and the laserlike focus on this one aspect of the game.
Alstein
4825
Improve the AI, and reduce the cheating the AI does. If needbe, others can lower the difficulty level. Not a hard fix at all.*
AI cheats do need to still exist for those who can stomp the AI easily, or use exploits. The AI needs to do a better job without cheating though.
A lot of the Civ V folks, Civ V is their first Civ, so the weak AI isn’t as big an issue for them. (The Grognards are the ones not playing it) Financially, the Civ V Steamworks decision was good for 2K, though I think it was at the cost of many of their long-time players, and I don’t know how many folks will stay around for Civ VI.
- Edit: I didn’t mean making the AI better was an easy fix, but I said dealing with player frustration at a harder AI is an easy fix.
Golly gee, no idea where you got this ;) I would indeed like to discuss Civ V without the thread being derailed by haters every time.
Not that it’s “wrong” or whatever to dislike Civ V or be disappointed by it. I totally understand why Tom et al find it lacking. There are those of us that do like the game, though, and we’d like to be able to use this thread too.
Oh, and I didn’t expect to have my approach to my job attacked for a bit of offhanded snark, but this is the Internet. I should know better.
Oh, Tom. You rascal. Just remember that he actually gave Elemental a higher score than CiV. Just stating a fact, read that however you will.
Just thought I’d chime in and say CiV is still my favorite Civ game, and while I would with it had a smarter AI, I’m not that great at the game myself anyway, so I’d just need to bump the difficulty down once they fix the damn AI. I’m okay with that if it means some of you guys (Tom) will start enjoying this game, like it was meant to be enjoyed!
I suspect that the majority of Civ players do not want an AI that can beat them. A game of Civ is a 10+ hour affair. Many people (most, I suspect) don’t want to get five hours into the game to discover that they’ve suddenly lost.
KevinC
4831
That is such an alien perspective to me. I want… no, demand, that an AI opponent can, and will, beat me. Especially when I’m new to the game, because then I go back and refine my strategy.
Not saying that’s right or wrong, it’s just so weird to me. I don’t see what’s wrong with losing a 5-hour game, or a 50-hour game for that matter.
Case
4832
Sid Meier would actually disagree with you.
From VentureBeat’s article about Sid’s keynote at last year’s GDC.
KevinC
4833
And that’s totally fine, I’m not saying my mindset is “right”, I’m just saying that the “I don’t want to lose at a strategy game” mindset is one that’s alien to me. :)
Quitch
4834
Yeah, once you can win… well the fun goes out of it. I like losing, it means I need to go back and reinvent the way I play. Once I know I’m going to win, well, what’s fun about that? At that point it’s not a strategy game it’s a sandbox.
It’s been noted that many Civ players don’t advance to a more difficult level until they can win every game at the easier level.
Hypothetically, with 10 civs in the world and perfectly balanced difficulty the player should win 1 out of 10 games. But people don’t want perfect balance. They want enough challenge to keep it interesting but not enough to seriously threaten defeat.
I’ve dealt with it by making up my own victory condition. If I survive to the end and have a decent civ it’s a win even if someone else built a spaceship.
That’s a pretty particular definition of balanced. Presumably this is over the run of say 100 tests to correct for positional imbalance.
I’d certainly guess that a majority of players probably don’t desire a 1/N chance of winning where N is the number of players, but I think your statement goes farther than that. Personally, I think given the choice a lot of players prefer a modest chance of defeat.
And what’s more, even if the AI is largely serving as a speedbump, I think it harms the experience when one becomes conscious of it.
SlyFrog
4837
Sure, people want to win games. But much like sports, you want the illusion that the other guy is good, and you beat him because you’re better.
Much like I doubt Kobe Bryant would get much enjoyment from competing in the Special Olympics, I assume most players don’t get a ton of enjoyment from beating Civ V’s AI. They may enjoy the city building aspects, the Zen like aspects of creation and moving pieces around, or perhaps even the feeling of somehow managing to win against a huge resource discrepancy against the “harder” AIs.
I’m not sure who you’re talking to or about, but I never gave Elemental any sort of score.
If you are addressing that to me, you’re thinking of 1up’s reviews. Eric Neigher reviewed Elemental and gave it a higher score than I gave Civ V. That somehow morphed into various butthurt Civ V fans accusing me of giving Elemental a higher score than Civ V when I’m not busy throwing babies out of the third-story windows of orphanages.
-Tom
Well, I actually have no idea how you approach your job, so I find it curious that you think I attacked you. But if you reviewed Civ V without at least pointing out some of its very real and concerning shortcomings, then I would say you failed at an important aspect of your job.
But as I said, I have no idea if you reviewed the game. I only know that it got a lot of favorable coverage from a lot of writers who were oblivious to its problems. And, as I said, I’m cool with people liking the game. I mean, it’s fun, right? But I like to think reviews look a little deeper than that aspect of a game.
-Tom
Man, you suck at quoting people. Here, just print this:
“The AI in Civilization V cannot play the game as it was designed to be played.”
There. That’s specific, simple, and considerably more helpful than me jumping in to tell you that, hey, I’m having fun. Whee!
-Tom
