Rywill
4961
You guys are crazy. It would be one thing if the stats weren’t so one-sided, because you’re right that there’s a certain amount of “noise” that’s going to be captured by stats like this. Some people never beat Prince because they start on King and never go back. Some people never beat Prince because they quit out every single winning game rather than finishing even one of them to see the victory screen / get the achievement / etc. But those people are probably few, and I think most of us would agree that’s not the way most gamers behave. Most people start off a new strategy game on average difficulty or lower, and most people finish a TBS game at least once. Any way you slice it, though, the numbers have some wiggle room.
But these numbers are massively one-sided. There are huge numbers of people who play this game every single day. The overwhelming majority of them (whether it’s 87%, or 85%, or even 80% or 70% or whatever you think it might be “in reality”) are being challenged by the AI even when it gets no production bonuses. To take the position that this game is somehow broken or easily beaten just flies in the face of overwhelming evidence.
I understand that the game isn’t fun for everyone, and if you’re one of the people who doesn’t like it, or who can beat it with one hand tied behind your back like Neo at the end of The Matrix, that’s cool. I’m not trying to convince you that Civ 5 is a good game for you or that you should play it more. But much of the tone of this thread, and Tom’s review, is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with Civ 5 as a whole because of its poor AI; that Civ 5 shouldn’t be recommended to gamers because it’s ruined by its poor AI. That is simply not true. If you don’t like it or can easily beat it, OK. Everyone has some games that just don’t click for them even if they like the genre (for me, Bioware RPGs, or Battlefield 2). But Civ 5’s lousy tactical AI, while a definite flaw, is hardly a game-breaker. At least not for the large majority of the large number of people playing it. You guys are like me with Bioware: you’re outliers.
And while it’s fine to say “I don’t like this game,” it’s inaccurate to say that the game is broken or unplayable or shouldn’t be recommended to Joe Gamer. And it’s definitely wrong to try and defend that position by saying the lopsided numbers of people playing and being challenged are meaningless. You don’t like their meaning because it contradicts your settled notions, but their meaning is plain to anyone with an open mind.
I think that’s a false conclusion. An alternate possibility is that the majority of players who complete at least one game are satisfied by the lower-to-middle difficulty levels, even if they are not substantially challenged by them and feel no need to attempt the higher ones.
My personal suspicion is that very, very few people want to play a Civ AI that has a chance of beating them.
Uh yes, that says right there that the difficulty is fine. Otherwise they wouldn’t enjoy playing. What’s so hard to understand about that?
In my books, your theory is still a theory.
Just like evolution!
Oh, now we call a massive amount of data “context-free” so we can dismiss it. That’s cute, I’ll have to remember that little trick!
It’s precisely the point because plenty of people are still playing which means that those few angry grognards who fired up a random level and never played again have been reduced to statistical noise by now. Whether you like that or not.
Frankly, the stats are laughable empty. Why are you trying to defend them as if they have any sort of meaning, when clearly they’re not intended to be taken as anything more than anecdote?
Statistics representing the entire Civ5 player base (excluding pirates): Empty anecdotes!
Whereas tales from the Jasper Phillips household: Irrevocable proof!
Sorry, I’m somehow not convinced.
That’s not a false conclusion, that’s the same conclusion. If you like playing on a given level then the difficulty on that level is appropriate for you, by definition. Nobody ever said anything about people being “substantially” challenged – that’s the same misunderstanding Equisilius seems to have. The discussion is about people being adequately challenged. Adequate means they’re having fun, no matter how little of a challenge they might get, by whatever measure.
I generally played Civ IV at emperor even though on occasion could beat it immortal. The reason I played at that level was because I knew that AI had a very good chance >50% of beating me or more precisely me deciding to restart the game.
Most gamers are competitive and want to be challenged, that is why game designer include, scores, victory cut scene, steam achievement, ladders etc. It is why even casual games like Tetris, ramp up the speed of dropping pieces etc. Are you suggesting that most Civ players are like Sim players it is all about playing they really don’t care about winning?
Anyway even if you are right and people don’t care about Civ AI, then it makes even less sense for Firaxis to devote resources to it.
rezaf
4966
Wait a second, I never said “they’re playing it wrong”.
The players I was referring to clearly play the game in a different way than I played it, but that’s not wrong.
Actually, much to my dismay, I think it’s quite the contrary.
The way Civ5 is design obviously caters these players more efficiently than it caters those who try/want to play Civ5 like they played Civ4, so the casual players are actually the players who play the game “right”.
In general, that’s not a big deal - there are many games out there I don’t want to play because they don’t deliver what I want from a game, but it stings a bit to have one of your favorite game series steered away from what you want it to be towards what another audience wants it to be.
Hence the disappointment.
Edit:
Oh. Well, that’s fine as well, isn’t it. But I thought your conclusion was that people were moving through the difficulties until they found the one which suited them best while I concluded they picked a semi-random low difficulty because they didn’t actually want challenge in the sense of that word, they want “moving targets”.
rezaf
No, that’s just an assumption I made but it’s not necessary to the argument. My conclusion is the same as yours, most Civ5 players are happy with a fairly low level of challenge, compared to what Civ4 grognards consider challenging. Doesn’t really matter how they arrive at the corresponding difficulty level.
Sarkus
4968
Still runs like a dog in the late game. Not seeing any improvement in that regard.
So I started a game on Prince and declared war on Genghis Khan. After a dozen turns at war where he took out one Horseman, one Pikeman and one Warrior, Khan offered peace with one of his cities. I should add I killed zero of his units.
How is this so hard to fix?
rezaf
4970
I’m not sure if it’s still around, but there was a mod in the modbrowser that limited every player to two or three workers.
Back when I tried it there were significant improvements, or at least it appeared that way to me.
The worker AI seems to waste a lot of cycles trying to decide on what tiles to improve with what, constantly changing it’s own opinion to boot.
rezaf
You sure he’s not overextended, maybe fighting a war on two fronts? I haven’t seen anything approaching what you describe without good reason for the AI to cave, but maybe I’ve just gotten lucky.
Re: everyone who says the Civ endgame is unbearably tedious, I find the endgame in Civ V to be the least tedious of any Civ game to date. And even, unbelievably, actually fun. Civ IV was a soul-killing slog by comparison.
I still want an option to resign and record my score, instead of having only my wins recorded on the high score list. I wonder if that could be modded in…
Tony_M
4972
I agree. Civ V is the best in the series in this regard. But even with all its improvements the endgame is still too long for my liking. At least the “Capture Capitals” victory condition offers a fairly quick/easy way to wrap the game up when you feel you’ve won.
Tony
It’s still happens, often, that Civ A asks you to go to war with Civ B whose location you don’t even know yet as you just met one of their scouts. So you say yes, you do nothing warlike at all for 20 turns, maybe not even having any more military units than your starting warrior, and then, yay, Civ B offers you cool stuff in return for peace.
What’s more, Civ B had perhaps been guarded or hostile for some random reason (it’s often very stupid: “Civ B is upset that you seem to want to win the same way as them” – this in the classical or medieval period, no less, when it’s impossible to make this determination) but now that you agreed to accept their submission in return for stopping a war you weren’t actually waging, they become friendly. The whole diplomacy system almost pessimal for the AIs; it’s like it was intentionally designed to make no sense at all.
Rywill concluded that players were “being challenged”, not that they were “adequately challenged”. My suspicion, based on watching various non-grognards play Civ, is that many players don’t want to be challenged by the Civ AI–that an “adequate” challenge is no challenge at all.
Civ 5 having bad AI effectively removes a big selling point from the game that a minority of gamers really care about, especially compared to late-patch Civ 4. It’s not as severe as Bethesda dropping mod support from Skyrim, but it’s the same sort of thing - fans of the series would go nuts, even though probably 10% or less have ever used a mod.
By your definition of challenge – not necessarily by theirs. Even a random stupid AI incursion can be a challenge if your idea of a fun Civ games means that you don’t prepare for invasions.
Sarkus
4977
It’s not that, it’s a general slowdown across the board. Noticeable delays on clicking, etc. Probably a memory leak issue, but still not fixed.
That’s weird considering I still often find a major civ capital which has stupidly left most of its luxury and food resources undeveloped after thousands of years worth of turns. It just goes to show how severe the handicaps at higher levels can be when the AI decides the overhead isn’t worth it. Still, you’d think they’d at least develop the luxury resources so they can trade them. Also, oddly, this isn’t consistent behavior. In the same game, Civ A will develop every hex in radius 3 from its capital in a sensible way, and Civ B will just develop the strategic resources, leaving most of its territory undeveloped.
He wasn’t over-extended, he only had 3 cities and we were in the early ADs. It as also an Archipelago map and my cities were all on islands far away from his cities.
I’ll start a new game tonight but it wasn’t very encouraging.
Sorry, you’re ignoring your own conclusion. You specifically stated “with the slight cheating on King already putting victory out of their reach” and “Less than a fifth of all players who beat Chieftain managed to beat King.” These aren’t phrases suggesting you mean that people are fine with the challenge level they are playing at; you are saying that the challenge level they are playing at is the highest level they are capable of winning. My point all along is that you can’t make those conclusions based on the stats you used. You were claiming that the difficulty is adequately challenging not that the difficulty level was adequate because players were having fun (which the stats don’t support either).
I think it’s a little late to backtrack on your argument after defending it for so long. But I’ll accept that you agree with me. That’s cool.
