There’s actually a good technical reason for that. Pre-recorded content like movies is compressed multiple times at varied bitrates using the highest quality compression. Since each piece of content only has to be compressed once, then stored, this is practical - even if it takes hours to compress a single episode that is a one-time cost. And having multiple bitrates allows the content to shift quality up or down in small increments to cope with network instability.
Games are a real-time, interactive experience. The time taken to encode the game’s output into a video stream is adding latency. So high bitrate transmission - such as 4K - are minimally compressed. The resulting video stream is much larger in bytes per second terms than a comparable video content stream. Further, the stream is not compressed at multiple bitrates. If the network lags briefly the receiver has to throw away late frames from the stream, request a lower bitrate from the sender, and start streaming again.
This is why you see hitches, drops, pauses, or stalls in streaming video games more frequently than with video.
The primary win condition is Fame, I believe. Some nations will likely get extra fame from conquest. You start as the Nubians in the Stadia demo and they get extra Fame from earning money. However, they also have a special Archer unit. Hopefully, it will be a compelling mechanic for peaceful players, while warmongers are free to do their thing as well.
Yeah, I wasn’t really able to distinguish the exploring-the-map excitement from the what-the-hey-are-all-these-mechanics excitement. The FIDSI (er, FIMSI now) system with building over sectors made it harder for me to grok what I should be excited about, though.
Heh, I did not understand that Fame would be a win condition, though they did tell me that I should try to get as much as possible and play again to see if I could get more, so maybe I just didn’t take the hint. But no, there wasn’t much indication of what the win conditions would be.
Took a look and it did not make a very good impression.
Tells you to look for food and industry, but your first city is already built, so that is not really your first concern. And if a second city is really the concern, then the basic mechanics of doing that would be helpful.
Click on Farmer’s Quarters in the build queue, but it builds a scout instead. Click on Farmer’s Quarters in the build queue again, when the unwanted scout is done, and it tells me the queue remains empty. Ditto if I click on Maker’s Quarter. But if I click on scout, it will train another of those – so clicking on the wanted item in the queue is the mechanic.
Shrug.
I played Endless Legend way back and had no problem with the mechanics of the game, though it was pretty good except for a bit of a lacking in the replayability department. But if they want input, I would think that the directions at the start would be a bit more clear.
At the very least they need to learn how to do better tutorial messaging and how to draw the player’s eye when they’re looking a screen with a million things already on it.
Yup, this seemed to me to be a misfire of the ingame tutorials. Definitely should have disabled it for the demo, as it’s literally the first thing that happens when you get into the game.
Most of the buildings (including the “Quarters”) are actually built on the map, so you need to click the Farmer’s Quarter button and then click the map tile you’re going to place it on. It absolutely should have been explained somewhere.
100% agree. I think I said this in my wall-o-text but this demo really seemed targeted at their fans who already knew how things worked.
I don’t really play these games but the demo seemed pretty straightforward to me. Seemed to have a fair bit in common with Civ6 - though I possibly only thought that because I tried the freebie version of that a few weeks ago and it’s the only one of these I’ve played…
This is way more interesting that Humankind has presented, so far. Are you saying you’ve only ever played one Civilization game, and it’s a Demo of CIV6 you got to a few weeks ago? I know there are a lot of newer gamers that can claim that, but didn’t think there were many on this site.
Further along in the Scenario, they explicitly state that Fame is the primary win condition. The civ with the most Fame at the end of 300 turns is the winner. I’m assuming, they’ll let you slow or increase the rate of development, thus adjusting the number of turns until the game finishes.
I think I finished the scenario in a little under 60 turns. It ends when you decide to advance to the third era. So, if you want to play the full 100 turns, do not choose to advance again.
I enjoyed the scenario. I can see a lot of replayability with choosing different cultures at different times. I also like the chance to change strategies throughout the game. I’m usually peaceful, but if I wind up bordering warmongers, it will be helpful to change gears through the different eras.
I’m not surprised I missed that (about Fame being the primary win condition). There was a lot going on, UI-wise.
I really wonder about this. I’m cautiously optimistic, but there are so many cultures (like 5 or 10 per era, and ? eras) that I’m not sure how different they can make them.
The cultures will mostly vary by their special building and unit. Beyond that, you then just choose if you want to expand, wage war, build, grow, or make money.
Sure, the question is if the special building/unit (and I think there are also some bonuses that vary by culture, like Nubians getting more points for trade or whatever) variety is enough for significant replayability. I think it’s very much an open one at this point.
Oh no doubt. I think it would be more impactful if they could better accumulate the cultures benefits throughout the eras. As it is, you may start off as the Nubians, but will that really matter much a couple of eras later?
Aside from Fame being the win condition, it would be nice if the lose condition isn’t complete obliteration of your civilization (whether by being forgotten or being wiped out in a myriad of ways). I’ve lost enough strategy games to want to be “not the greatest, but at least you survived.”
I usually lose because I don’t go full steam ahead trying to accomplish a singular goal. If I can win by being really good at being a generalist, that’d be something.
I played BG1 and 2, finished neither of them and couldn’t tell you what the story was. I think I paused a lot in combat or… something. One of them was co-op, maybe both, though in half-ass kind of way.
You certainly didn’t miss much with Baldur’s Gate 1. I also missed out on Ultima, it was before my time in gaming. I didn’t even know it existed until Ultima 9 came out and by then the older games were too old.
But man, you missed out on something truly special by not experiencing Civ 1 and 2. Seriously. I can’t even explain why exactly, but I’ll always credit Civ for being the first spark that started my interest in history. Before that, History was just a boring class in which you learned dates about what happened a long time ago that I didn’t care about.
Did anyone early access this? If you have it in your library, you can play the next opendev period - At more than 100 turns, facing off against 7 other civilizations from the Neolithic to the end of the Early Modern Era.
I’d be real curious to hear how this is going because it seemed lackluster in the opendev period I participated in. I don’t own it so I can’t try this one out.
