Right, now they should drop whatever half assed idea they’ve come up with and make a crossover between FTL and Space Rangers 2. Chop Chop.
They ARE, first and foremost a company that has to stay afloat, so I can at least relate to the reasoning.
People here don’t like them? There’s a FEW people that will even admit they don’t think CiV is the best Civ game ever or that they like ye olde X-Com better than XCOM, and those few are then shouted down by a crowd of people that love those games to bits and (with more than a little justification) point to the games’ Steam statistics (especially that of Civ5).
Since some folks desperately want to see my usual wording of this as a personal insult, I’ll let Dale’s statement inspire me to phrasing it this way: Firaxis went from making fantastic games to making games that are also fantastic, but in a different fashion.
Those who put an emphasis on the things that made the old games fantastic can feel a bit left behind…
As for Starships … it still looks like a Civ5 mod to me. Maybe with an “adventure focus”, but at this point and judging by those few screenshots, everything is basically speculation…
rezaf
This is the main reason that I won’t day one purchase anything from Firaxis or 2K. The A.I. is either dismal or outright cheats and it just ruins any game once you realise it.
I don’t know why, but it seems like people just can’t accept that a designer can make a bad game or bad design decisions, it always comes down to Big Corporate trying to make more money. While I think civ 4 is better than civ 5, and BE isn’t very good, I feel like it’s because the games had design flaws. Civ V was made servicable by the expansions, but it still isn’t very tightly designed the way civ 4 is.
1UPT is conceptually flawed, too, but in a way that’s not immediately obvious. Even if the AI could play it well, Panzer General was a game designed in a very different way and for different things. The playable map area was bigger, the combat design was quite a bit different, and it plain had a different focus. The AI in that game wasn’t very good, either, but since its role was mostly to delay a player from getting that Brilliant Victory, just sitting around and launching spoiler attacks is okay.
I kinda think XCOM is a bit better than old X-Com, though, but I can see why someone would prefer the older game because the tactical playbook is more open, it’s just a lot more swingy.
And to get back on topic, Starships looks a lot more like Pirates but with a more transparent city layer than like a 4x game.
I don’t think 1UPT is conceptually flawed, Civ5 problem was in the execution.
Most space games are actually 2d, if you think about it. Gal Civ series, Master of Orion series, FTL, Weird Worlds, Distant Worlds, AI War, SPAZ, StarSector, Gratuitous Space Battles, etc etc.
Um…Baaaa
I like Civ V. I’m a casual Civ Fan. I’ll play a game here and there and never really get good at it. I could tell Civ V had a worse AI because I could win at the mid-high difficulties but I still had fun. I was never a fan of the stack of doom, even though I could appreciate that at least the AI could play it.
I’m a filthy casual Civ Fan. :)
Sword of the Samurai tried to do all things for all people:
And might be one of the best games of all time? Granted this was Sid’s early days and he just worked on the Samurai one on one combat section.
If this game is very specifically aimed at the iOS rather than PC, then most likely i will find it too ‘casual’, but i’m hoping it is more the other way around and we have atleast a bit of depth to the gameplay. Sid does not have to become the George Lucas of games, he can still make games that encourage kids to think (like Civ1+2, X-com and Pirates! did for me back in the day), rather than just hit the ‘press here(to win)’ button that is normal ‘lite’ gaming fare. Will he? I just don’t know.
If you add the Long War Mod you will likely say it IS better than the old XCOM. I think XCOM:EU with Long War is probably my favorite game of all time. It’s still not as micro as the old one (a good thing in my book) but they go a long war to bringing the difficulty back in and evening out the difficulty curve (meaning it starts hard and you’ll never tech up enough to make it easy - it will keep up the challenge the whole game),
‘Open X-com’ is where X-com is now at. That fixed a bunch of issues on the old game. The new X-com was really a different game, almost completely, and as such it did not really scratch that X-com itch for me (granted i only played it briefly much later), it was just too limited in most aspects of the originals games design and game features.
Get Xenonauts instead.
Not only that. Any kind of realistic space game would inherently be “orbital” (potential) based rather than position based (that is active thrust would be negligible respect to distances AND firing range). So it basically abstracts into a point-to-point combat system, which is perfectly reasonable to abstract into 2D (in a way, High Frontier has the most realistic map of the solar system I’ve seen…).
Or this is how I personally justify these things :P
I thought Elite 2/FFE did a fairly good job at presenting a map with x, y and z. At least in principle.
I heard that of ED is not good, but don’t know any specifcs.
Anyway, for those that don’t remember or don’t know the games, the older Elites did a normal x/y map where the systems had a fix point and rested on a “pillar” that helped visualize the z dimension.
This picture doesn’t exactly do the best job of showcasing what I mean, but I couldn’t find a better one just now.
rezaf
I think FFE had a cool map, that drove home the point that you were playing in a real galaxy, which was an important part of the game for me (it had immersion value) but it was confusing as hell to see ranges in the z-axis in the rare cases 2 planets were very distant from each other. In short, it was mostly decorative and when it wasn’t it was annoying. YMMV.
Could be, but knowing Sid and his coding preferences, if he is lead designer on it it is more likely to be based on Ace Patrol than Civ 5 (but that is also speculation).
Well, if a game wants to portray the z axis (as opposed to steamlining it away like most games do), I still liked that model best.
By 1995 UI standards, I thought it was fairly useable, but these things are always highly subjective anyway.
I want to say there was a 4x game that used this model, but I can’t remember which it was. Ascendancy used it for solar systems, and that was pretty ok in my book as well.
Ace Patrol sucks arse. Well, actually I can’t say anything about it’s gameplay - the reason I feel it sucks is that I tried to play it on three computers and a laptop and it crashed on me every time I tried to run it. That was pretty disappointing…
rezaf
If only you were a proper fatuous sheep, you would have taken your crashes and liked every minute of them.
Sucks to be a discerning gaming gentleman?
I can just imagine having the Oculus and the map screen being a projection of the entire galaxy in a sphere around you.
Hmmm. The screenshot reminded me of Distant Worlds for some reason. And so far, there is nothing in the description that sounds very different from any standard 4X space game.
But, if Sid REALLY is the lead designer, I’ll keep an eye on it, and the reviews when it comes out. But it won’t be a day 1 purchase for me.
Ace Patrol is fine (when it runs), but it isn’t very deep. I’m sort of curious about the direction that Starships will take, but I’m not particularly optimistic.