Also, they twiddled their thumbs and took their sweet time before releasing the long promised SDK, and when they finally did many of the enthusiastic modders that had grand designs in mind when Civ5 was released had already moved on (or even back to Civ4). The fact that the official tools are extremely poorly documented and doing any graphics modding is a complicated and error prone process doesn’t help either.
On top, I maintain that Civ5 is a strategy game for people that are more inclined towards a casual, strategy-lite experience rather than a true strategy game.
Nothing wrong with that by itself, of course, but I get the impression that this casual crowd includes a much, much smaller number of people with the will and resolve to invest the huge amounts of time it takes to get truly complex modding projects off the ground.
In any event, after promising the “most moddable Civ ever”, Firaxis sure fumbled this one … and then they moved on to not supporting modding AT ALL in XCOM…
Ok, i see what you are saying, and i understand completely how a creative process can take it out of you, especially if nailed so perfectly. However the themes (and politics) you covered in SMAC are more relevant now than they were before, and importantly we (collectively) are losing the battle for our future under the onslaught of naked greed. Earth and Humanity needs help, now more than ever. If you need ‘fresh juice’ you will find it all around you, i’m sure many here would chip in to provide it if asked (and for free). These days you can build a community pretty easily, especially under the crowd-funding method.
Imagine a modern SMAC, what it could be like, what important messages it could give to a new generation? Imagine how successful it would be? It would be enough.
As for Battlestar, i found it started to drift after that first season. It had potential, but as you know, channeling that creative brilliance is some kind of magic, and difficult to do.
Put me in the “cautiously optimistic” camp. I do like the idea of a sci-fi frontier/colonization type game, but changing “settlers” into “colony pods” isn’t enough if the gameplay isn’t substantially novel.
Well, I must say that a substantial part of SMAC’s appeal was the sensibility conveyed by the non-gameplay elements like the wonder videos, the sententious leader sayings, and so on. There really wasn’t much new gameplay in it at all. But the story layers on top were really great. From Sister Miriam to Academician Prokhor Zakharov, all that stuff was of uniformly high quality and superbly executed. In theory you could just plaster that kind of thing on top of any 4x and get the same effect. But in practice, the conception and integration of all those non-gameplay elements is not a trivial thing to summon on command; it requires inspiration and a great deal of effort. All the Civs after SMAC have failed to provide that kind of layer, so I’m not enormously optimistic about this latest iteration. That doesn’t mean the game would necessarily be bad without it, but if it uses the Civ 5 engine and the same basic rules of unit movement and combat, then the underlying gameplay won’t be enough to carry it either. So… we’ll see, I guess.
What?! There were huge gameplay changes! Remember: SMAC came out after CIV2 and before Civ3.
[ul]
[li] The orthogonal government modes that didn’t make it into civ until civ 4.[/li][li] The civ borders.[/li][li] The way you could build any units.[/li][li] The modifiable terrain and dynamic weather system.[/li][li] The way the terrain/worms fought back – very different from ‘barbarians’. Cutting down trees in Civ doesn’t send angry worms your way.[/li][li] Sea cities!! (Ok, so it’s just a city in the sea with ‘kelp’ as the irrigation…)[/li][li] Getting rid of the idea that cities must pay for units individually, which sucked in civ 1 and 2. (Note; I might be mis-remembering this). [/li][li] The way the tech tree worked and the blind research.[/li][li] The global UN[/li][li] Mega nukes![/li][li] Not-shit AI.[/li][li] Nerve stapling.[/li][/ul]
Civ 3 was such a disappointment after playing SMAC. Especially the extremely obvious cheating the AI did. (SMAC’s AI also cheated, but cheated in non-bvious ways like the earlier civs did)
Sadly no, SMAC still had home-city upkeep requirements. You could upgrade to “clean” reactors late in the game which eliminated the upkeep costs, but until then, you had to pay shields for each unit based out of a particular city. This was definitely one of the more irritating aspects of SMAC, but it was inherited from Civ 2, so SMAC itself doesn’t take all of the blame for that one.
Civ 3 was a step backwards, although the Conquests expansion did finally make the game worth playing.
So yeah, I will be interested to see if Beyond Earth includes novel gameplay changes, since those will largely determine my level of interest in the game.
[/li]
IMHO this still hasn’t been done as well anywhere else.
This had a so much unrealized potential. I’m still a bit disappointed that all the wacky terraforming options basically just boiled down to farm/solar or mine/solar or sometimes trees and occasionally a borehole or condenser. The raising/lowering terrain was really cool, in theory, but it just didn’t end up being that useful.
It’s funny how different aspects of a game can be irritating to some people while others are completely fine with it.
Unit maintenance never bothered me all that much - technically, I’d have preferred an implementation where all cities generate some amount of “troop supply” and then the actual city where the units were built does not matter, but you could easily rebase units, and I thought it was a valid abstraction of the idea that an army needs to receive it’s supplies from somewhere. It also provided a natural “unit cap”, because you usually would not want to rob your cities of too much production via unit support, so you’d hold back a bit on the unit building front.
So the mechanic never bothered me one bit - in fact, I wish Age of Wonders 3 had something like it, because it nicely showcases how out-of-hand the amount of armies can get if there are no more or less hard limits involved.
I knew I might be misremembering. One thing Civ 3 had in its favour was a single government-wide gold upkeep all soldiers*, which I’ve liked since then. Though I think the Colonisation method is best : ‘grow’ soldiers, use them as labour for a bit then give them a gun if you need to.
Actually, I’m still unsure if I like gold better than wheat. But at least it’s not home-city, which is a horrible idea. I can understand nearest-city… just.
While I agree, at least it was something. SMAC-alikes like Pandora generally got rid of weather and terraforming completely, and even in the Civ series, what little terraforming it had was basically phased out. And you COULD do some nice things like raise land out of the sea to build land cities.
In civ2: Imagine you specialise a city to have lots of hammer. You can’t actually “churn” loads of units out of that city because it required wheat support for each unit, which your specialised city is unlikely to have, so you have to spread your unit building around. Especially as there was usually a ‘free’ amount the unit could hold. There’s pros and cons, with the pro being it’s a nice natural unit cap, but it’s mostly cons to my eyes as it meant the cities because very similar and because it’s bloody annoying that the nice city nested amongst the hills and mountains couldn’t produce units, because it didn’t have much wheat income.
One memory I have of the terrain is deliberately raising a giant mountain up to try and change the weather/water distribution to ‘peacefully starve out’ an enemy. Except they were far enough away that it didn’t affect them and actually affected me a bit :(
Hmm. From my memory, “normal” units didn’t require food support, just shields - only settlers “ran” on food. Am I misremembering this?
And where the shields were pulled from was easy to control, as you could set another home city for units at any time (well, iirc you had to travel there first, which could be kinda annoying, but mostly was a non-issue).
Like I wrote, I’d have preferred a “pooled” approach that was a little more sophisticated, but to me, the simple gold consumption is a much worse tool for getting the same job done. From the looks of it (and a bit to my surprise), I seem to be pretty alone with this, though.
