I think I remember Civ III being this way. But I can’t remember for sure, it’s been too long.
Really why? If he doesn’t want to answer that’s fine. But he hasn’t been an employee of Firaxis for many years.and he is still involved in developing strategy games. Most importantly not only is the AI in Civ IV the best in the series, the computer opponent in Off World Trading Company also was a very challenging opponent.
I once attended a talk Soren gave at GDC on among other subjects creating good AI.
Yup. Civ 4 definitely had the most fine tuned UI and AI. Reading Sulla’s page and tons of Civ 4, 5, and 6 articles really gives you an understanding of how the series has taken huge steps backward since 4 in more areas than not. The only neat new additions that (sort of) work in 6 are districts and boosts. Everything else is a complete mess.
He also mentioned the difference in development. 4 was made with consulting tons of hardcore tournament Civ 3 fans. 5 & 6 were mostly small, closed teams who either had no clue what they were doing, or whose input fell on deaf designer ears. Stuff like Magnus’ double chop governor bonus shows they have no clue what they’re doing. The rumor that the entire team hated the “must have full movement cost to move into a space” change but Ed Beach insisted it stay shows it’s probably an upper management problem.
Stacks of doom weren’t even THAT overpowered. Experienced players knew how to trap them and take them apart. But they were effective enough that it gave the economically powerful, but tactically deficient AI a fighting chance. I’ll take the SOD bulkiness over the 1UPT disaster any day.
Yeah. I think this is a key point.
A pretty large segment of the people who post on forums like this want the game tailored for the expert and near-expert. People who play the game dozens and dozens of times, and get to know/hate all the loopholes, all the exploits, all the choices with a clear best answer, all the areas where the AI is unable to follow through on its threats, etc.
But a pretty large segment of the buying public buys a game, plays it a few times, and that is it. Which leads to quite a different perspective. Thinking through my own experiences, the first time or two that I played the orginal civ, the first time I played any succeeding version, the first time I played Rise and Fall, I can still get a glimpse of this perspective. It’s a different game, more of an adventure into the unknown, more of role-playing a civ through the ages, and far less a strategic analysis of the rules. Except that, well, I will come back to the except.
My sense is that at least since 4, Firaxis has been increasingly concerned about the latter group. I’m thinking that this is basically a business decision, thinking that like all companies, they need growth, and the less hard-core audience is required for growth. The outsized personalities of AI opponents fits this well. They have put a lot of resources into making you despise your rivals, which has a much broader appeal than detailed strategizing, min-maxing etc.
I understand Firaxis’s concern. They are big and secure compared to indie developers, but PC gaming isn’t all that big a pond, and they are by no means an entertainment giant, their resources are definitely limited. And their priorities seem to be to broaden appeal as opposed to catering to the near-expert crowd, who they hope can be mollified with multi-player and mods. And perhaps they really have no choice; it would be extremely difficult to expand the audience for the game without expanding features, and expanded features makes good AI ever more expensive to pursue, and good AI is really the only way to satisfy the expert crowd.
But despite the fact that I personally enjoy the game immensely (I am aggravated by several things, but I clearly come back to it over all the alternatives out there), I have a sense that their business decisions are transforming Civ into a very un-cool game. Wherever you go and read about gaming, smart people are slamming the game, such that it is embarrassing to speak out and say you think it is a lot of fun… and THAT alone is likely to sink their plans to grow the base.
Further, I think they are overlooking a fundamental shift in the audience for games. Nowadays, a huge portion of gamers watch gameplay online before ever buying or at least before playing much… so they are far quicker to become knowledgeable players, who then complain far sooner about the repetiveness caused by unclosed loopholes and exploits. It’s all well and fine for players like myself to say, “Hey, I know that that is OP to the point of broken, so I won’t use it.” From what I am seeing, a large number of people have this compulsion to take shortcuts to discover all the exploits, but then don’t enjoy the game because of the exploits… and then put the game down, creating negative buzz. Probably even worse for makers of CRPGs whose audience tends to look up all the spoilers ahead of time, but then doesn’t like the game because the adventure isn’t very adventurous. But also true for a strategy game like Civ.
But let’s face it, if Ed Beach asked me for advice as to direction, I wouldn’t know what to tell him. Because the other route is fraught, too. Catering to the hard-core from past versions is always going to be problematic, because of the nostalgia factor. People get attached to myriad different details from a past versions, so pretty much no matter what you change, you’ll have a crowd howling over missing that wonderful aspect of the past version.
I may have missed this being linked, but here are the changes planned for the Spring Update.
To me the only thing I want/need to enjoy this game would be a vastly improved AI that makes sense in it’s decisions (from declaring war to getting annoyed) and while they do mention the AI getting improved here, I’m not convinced this is the patch I’m waiting for.
This is the patch I’ve been waiting for.
Great post, good sir.
Heck, we just had this discussion about Falcon 4.0 in another thread. Some people said that by catering to the hardcore, the flight sim essentially died.
For me personally, I have my own individual quirks that I absolutely cannot do without. I just love discovering those huts all over the Earth map. And I like saving the game right before discovering a hut and continuously loading until I get the best possible hut. One of the Civs had this pre-rolled odds option so that no matter how many times you loaded the game, you got the same result for huts and for combat. It drove me crazy. I just couldn’t play with that option enabled because of previous Civ-game habits I’d developed.
I guess I like a challenge, but I also love exploiting any advantage I can possibly exploit while I’m playing.
It’s weird, but I have absolutely no interest in a Civ game that:
- Doesn’t have an Earth map.
- Doesn’t allow me to save scum and get the best possible huts on said Earth map.
See that’s not me. I just play games to have fun. I don’t even mind if there is a somewhat noticeable deficit… but Civ VI’s is glaring and frustratingly so bad. It’s not something I can overlook, not because I want to have some sort of tactical war game that has me moving my pieces so precisely that I it’s like the art of war strategies here… I just don’t want the AI squeeze a bunch of cities into a space too small, declare wars that make no sense to engage in AND be unable actually play the tactic they designed the game to use by going with a single unit per hex system.
Aka, I am not interested in hardcore war-games in my civilization games and even I find the AI to be outrageously incompetent in the wars it starts.
Bingo. The AI just keeps shoving it’s ludicrous deficiencies in your face over and over. It makes it real hard to turn a blind eye to it when it keeps forcing you to deal with the incompetence.
My complaint isn’t that the AI in Civ5/6 doesn’t play at an expert level, it’s that it doesn’t understand the very basics of the game. I’m talking egregiously stupid shit, like declaring wars when it can’t reach you, leading an attack with un-escorted Great Generals for a long time in Civ5, or sending defenseless Settlers wandering through my territory shortly after declaring. Civ5 modders fixed these issues using the tools provided by Firaxis, which proves all it takes is some effort on their part.
Fixing glaring issues like that wouldn’t make the AI play at an expert level, but at least it wouldn’t be so embarrassingly neglected.
And they keep adding more and more fiddly shit that the AI couldn’t possibly understand and utilize, even beyond the tactical stuff over to the economic stuff. It still can’t even figure out how to generate tourism, you think it’s ever going to figure out governors or golden/dark ages?
I would point Ed to stuff like Sulla’s articles or any number of Realms beyond Civ threads.
There’s “obscure loopholes only hardcore experts would spot” (the great person or civil service slingshot in Civ 4), and then there’s “how the hell did this make it through a single play session, let alone prolonged testing?”
I don’t even think it’s all casual appeal. There’s nothing friendly about Civ6’s UI, casual or expert. The slow movement rule change is frustrating to both first time and expert players. The psycho diplomacy harshes people who just want to play Civ City and experts who want strategic competition choices.
One would hope that the difficulty levels would cover the needs of the casual and hardcore strategy gamer. If someone wants a pushover experience, set the game to beginner and have at it. Expert players should get a good challenge out of the highest difficulty and not just because the AI get artificial resource boosts.
Yeah, as I posted way up the thread, I agree that the military AI is just egregiously bad. The one problem with playing the Cree is that you then get to see more areas of the map, where your allies can see… and thus have to watch AI versus AI wars. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. You would think both sides had been paid to throw the fight.
However… From what you post, you are nowhere near as far along the spectrum towards “casual player” as you may be thinking. People like you and me might not be Civ militarists, but we have played the game so often that instead of getting the thrill of intense competition when two neighbors declare a joint war on us… well, we have seen this too many times to do anything but yawn. And so this flaw in the game affects us very differently than it affects new players (and very differently than it affected me the first time I played).
Assuming you are answering my post, I really don’t think you are understanding the conundrum I am describing. It’s not as simple as difficulty levels. The “more stuff” that they have added to appeal to players on early playthroughs ends up making it pretty much impossible to have a game that holds up well once players have transitioned from playing “Guide a Civilization through History” to “Sharp Use of Game Rules.” They have created a game with too much stuff for any conceivable AI that could be developed by a company of this size. And that is just part of it.
I agree with this completely. I’d so much rather play Civ V than VI. It’s not about one having some kind of abstract complexity more sophisticated than the other. It’s that CIv V actually seems designed - for better or worse - where Civ VI seems made by… a team that’s just… less… sophisticated of designers. It’s both more grognardy and completely dysfunctional, full of ironic choices and world-weary game making. I wouldn’t say slapdash? Civ VI seems to have a much worse intuitive grasp on how all the moving pieces fit together.
Actually I think @Telefrog might be onto something. I hadn’t really considered it before, but maybe they should have two different experiences. On beginner, you get the one with all these complex game systems that are fun for the player, but that the AI is unable to handle. But on Prince and harder, it strips away those systems and has a simpler game, but one that’s more challenging because the AI is better able to handle this simpler systems.
I’ll freely admit I am probably not a casual player by most definitions. I’m probably hardcore for most genres even, and yeah if I like a game, I don’t easily get bored with it, especially strategy/ city-builder, and I’ll play for years. I do think there is a group above me though, it’s not the speedrun or play 10 hours a day group, although they’re there too, it’s the I see an exploit and it ruins it group and the the only way to maximize your outcome or efficiency group that will say if you don’t build your 3rd city by round 60 might as well start over group.I can consciously ignore some exploits because I prefer to play the spirit of the game.
… but until recently it seemed like Civilization did what none of the Paradox games seem to really do, cater to the casual crowd, the top tier crowd and then those of us who are somewhere between those two ends.
My point is… I find this game not hugely enjoyable as a sort of middle tier, middle ground player. It’s not just that top group they’re losing, and I think that’s unfortunate. My sister has always been less picky about her games on some level, but at the same time, she played Dwarf Fortress for a couple of years, and I just didn’t touch it. She’s not really casual either but in many ways, more casual than I am.
Spring update available now.
- Joint Wars
- 12 new historic moments
- End game summary screen
- Balance and bug fixes
I got excited when I saw the end game summary screen, but alas it is new graphs. 3 new graphs that I’m sure are just as unreadable as the current crop of graphs.
AI development still looks lacklustre. Only one way to find out for sure. But at the same time, I have many other, better games to play.
A feeble stab at a halfway decent end game summary screen, 2 years after release.
This is so sad.