Oh yeah, I always forget about Sword of the Stars (because I really couldn’t get into it).
That’s too bad, it’s one of the best 4X games ever made, IMO. Well, it reached that point after an expansion or two, at release it was pretty mediocre.
The implementation in SotS was the closest I’ve seen, certainly. It played quite differently to MOO though due to techs having prerequisites: if it decided you were missing a specific tech, you’d also miss out on everything past it.
This usually worked pretty well, but it would occasionally effectively shut you off from end-game weapons entirely. More commonly, you’d go down the the most likely weapons line for your race, discover a blockage, and have to spend ages researching down a new weapons branch and hope you didn’t get shut off from that one too.
This is the full tree, with probabilities:
A note on reading that: two power techs were necessary but not sufficient prerequisites for large chunks of the tree - that’s the yellow and purple background colour areas.
I always thought the tech tree in Alpha Centauri was brilliant…if I recall, you could pick individual techs and micro it or just pick a category for the big picture
As far as the next xpac here, sure looks like civ6 is goin the ‘builder’ route…i’m ok with that…less need to deal with AI I suppose
There was a completely blind option as well, I believe.
As it happens, there was some apparent randomisation in available tech choices in Alpha Centauri too. When you had free tech selection on, it would actually remove some techs from consideration based on the number of techs you had already discovered. Split into three groups, so a tech would appear two-thirds of the time. Looks random to the player, but they’re guaranteed to get the tech they want available next time if it wasn’t this time.
Knowing this means you need to track it in high-level play to ensure you can always reach your current tech target as quickly as possible.
That’s what everyone says. Which is why I bought it on… three different platforms. But I always bounce of it, hard. Doesn’t help that it’s so ugly.
Yeah, I didn’t stick with it for long either. If my memory is correct, it’s 4X for gamers who want exploration minimized and extermination maximized. And I find that without meaningful exploration, I tire of a game rather quickly.
However, as to Civ using a randomized tech tree, I would agree @rho21 that they cannot simply leave techs out on a given run. (They could fill in the military gaps, so that each military type had an advance each age, and then randomize the appearance of those… but that would be an anemic implementation.)
Rather, Civ would do better randomizing the order and the connections and possibly the inspiration conditions. This would have a profound impact on the human player because one of the ways the human advantages is learning an ideal route to coordinate build/inspiration progress, and simply having that route so established is a lot more ahistorical than having techs appear at different times in history.
Oh, SoTS is a wargame. It’s even moreso than AOW3.
But I don’t think it’s far off MOO1 in terms of X priorities.
Civ VI looks so great. I have been watching Quills’s new Lets Plays and nearly got it.
The one thing that stops me is the AI. I keep thinking I should just bump the difficulty and stop worrying about it.
I bounced off of V for the same reason. It felt like I was picking on a 2 year old.
If you’ve waited this long, you might want to wait until they’re done with expansions and release the modding tools (assuming they’re still planning to do that). Civ5’s modding community was able to whip the AI into shape, so I’d expect the same thing here.
I’d agree; it’s a pure wargame in space. And yeah, the aesthetics aren’t for everyone with the cartoonish ships, but they remind me of the space cartoons of my younger years so I like them.
I’ve also been around the block with the game once or twice, so I MAY be slightly biased …
(editor’s note - I leave the game running in the background while doing other stuff, lol)
I just downloaded Vox Populi so perhaps that’s the best solution. Clearly good AI is not profitable to 2K or they would hire one of these guys.
I thought the colours were garish, the illustrations amateurish, and the use of gradients just terrible. So that definitely didn’t help.
And I put Civ6 away until they’re finished tinkering with it. Same as Stellaris now, too. I’ll play these games when they’re done. (Though I’ve had more fun with Stellaris than any Civ since IV.)
Since the original Civ board game had floods, I like seeing them and other weather events return, even though I don’t know how much difference they will make. And I am like the random technology trees, even though I wish they had pushed this to earlier eras too. And I really like having build queues.
Even at max difficulty, it is impossible to lose against the AI (outside of a starting unit rush in the first 30 turns).
I lose to the AI all the time! On Emperor, anyway. But then, I play a peaceful game. I like building a civilization, not fighting. If I want a wargame, I play War in the Pacific or something.
Same here. AI seems to only be ‘bad’ for those that play the wargame. Playing a peaceful game, it’s just a tech/build race and it seems to do just fine at squashing me. Then again, I’m probably not considered a good Civ player, either.
I wonder if there’s a way forward for the Civ series to simply double-down on the civilization builder/manager aspects and abandon some of its 4x trappings? It seems like Civ 6 is in kind of purgatory right now between genres. It’s probably too radical a departure for such an established series, but abstracting the military conflicts could solve a lot of its AI problems, and at the scale Civ operates at it’s not as if the combat was every especially compelling to begin with. Plus, the 4x genre as a whole looks to be on a serious downswing. So long as I can still explore the world, I don’t think I would miss not being able to shuffle military units around a map in Civ.
I might enjoy that, personally. The boardgame “Through the Ages” works sort of like that. I get to work on building my empire, and while I do have to put resources into the military, combat is resolved abstractly. But yeah, it would be a pretty radical departure, and I doubt Firaxis would ever do it. Maybe a modder could?
You mean, like going back to stacks? I never understood the need to go 1UPT with Civ in the first place. Though Warhammer 40K: Gladius has shown that you can actually make it work, I agree that it doesn’t fit the scale of Civ.