Dutch magazine Kijk - Preview

[V. Soma]

on Apolyton it is written:

The Dutch popular-scientific magazine (Kijk) had a peek into the kitchen of Firaxis and features a 4-page article on Civilization V in this month's paper edition.

important bits from the Apolyton thread:

Jon tells that ... the number of mod tools for Civ 5 will increase.

Ed Beach is responsible for AI development:
"Every moment in the game the AI is busy to figure out it's position in the game and what's going to be the best move to come closer to victory".

Ed states that this is a task difficult to accomplish because there are
"six types of victory the player and the AI can freely pick from any moment". There are 30 different possible flavours every civ can have. From an offensive attitude to what types of units it prefers. And varying from how active it will explore the map to how important the infrastructure will be.

Beach concludes by confirming that the AI will be smart enough to take advantage of a war between two neighbours by snatching away a not so well defended city on it's borders.

 

[MatrixTheKitty]

Six, eh? Well, let's see..

Conquest
Domination
Cultural
Diplomatic

Hmm. The fifth Victory in Civ IV is AP, but with religion gone, the AP is obviously gone, too.

I wonder what the remaining two victories are..

Ooh, perhaps there's an Economic Victory of sorts?

 

[civ_king]

AP is a diplomatic victory...

 

[V. Soma]

Space is one, obviously

 

[MatrixTheKitty]

Oh, d'oh, forgot about Space ><

Probably because it's 12:20 over here XD

 

[Linoran]

The sixth has to be time victory no?

 

[V. Soma]

The sixth has to be time victory no?

yeah, or some variant of it - "Mastery" or some other score-calculation

 

[MatrixTheKitty]

Oh yeah, forgot about time victory, too.

 

[Gliese 581]

I never take statements about AI to heart because let's face it, game AI sucks unless it's playing something like chess and will continue to do so for a couple of decades probably. All we can hope is that it is an improvement over its predecessors.

 

[V. Soma]

I read in the "Confirmed features" thread that
CFC member J-man has copy of this Kijk issue...

hey, J-man, could you give us more report on it?

 

[blacksmit049]

6 victories again. hmmm..but it is stated that you can pick freely, maybe there are more than 6. Surprised me Firaxis

 

[Chalks]

Isn't "6 victories that you can pick from at any moment" just the same as it was before? I mean, I assume he means 6 victories you can pick to head towards, rather than "humz, I feel like winning now *poof*".

I don't really understand the significance of the quote. There isn't any victory condition lock-in in previous versions is there?

 

[Louis XXIV]

If the 6th is time, I'll be a bit disappointed, since it likely means exactly the same as before.

 

[kivanc]

John and Ed are talking too much while giving the least info they can give.
i suppose this is a kind of old-fashioned manager stuff; that managers don't do anything but only deal with relations or project planning etc.

in modern business, this style has already been left. john and ed should work more instead of wasting time on magazine talks, these talks include so many useless hints.

we just heard 25 types of flavors and now we hear it 30. there is sth wrong about the marketing strategy. are they fooling us or what?

 

[obscurereferenc]

CivRev also had an Economic Victory (get x amount of gold and build the world bank wonder), so Civ 5's 6th victory type could be something similar

 

[snipperrabbit!!]

John and Ed are talking too much while giving the least info they can give.
i suppose this is a kind of old-fashioned manager stuff; that managers don't do anything but only deal with relations or project planning etc.

in modern business, this style has already been left. john and ed should work more instead of wasting time on magazine talks, these talks include so many useless hints.

we just heard 25 types of flavors and now we hear it 30. there is sth wrong about the marketing strategy. are they fooling us or what?

IIRC, they said 25 was not final and I don't take 30 as the definite number of flavour although it may be the case.

 

[Gre_Magus]

Isn't "6 victories that you can pick from at any moment" just the same as it was before? I mean, I assume he means 6 victories you can pick to head towards, rather than "humz, I feel like winning now *poof*".

I don't really understand the significance of the quote. There isn't any victory condition lock-in in previous versions is there?

The article is actually talking about the AI choosing, not you. The AI programmer remarks that it is challenging to make the AI evaluate its position each turn and decide what moves will give it a better chance of winning when there are six victory conditions that it could be pursuing.

I think this could be a very interesting improvement. Rather than just have the AI always play to become "stronger" it might able to pursue specific victory paths, like cultural, conquest, etc.

 

[Gre_Magus]

On another note, the flavors seems like an interesting feature. It should be very easy (maybe even possible within the game UI?) to change a leader's personality or create a new leader by mixing and matching the flavors. I can see a screen with a bunch of sliders, one for each flavor, that are preset to the defaults but can be changed when starting a new came. At the least, though, it should be easy to change in the XML.

 

[kivanc]

ok then. 30 flavors, 18 leaders?

so will we have 30 parameter and each of the 18 leader will have a different strength on these flavors?

like:
cathy: expansion 10, growth 8, military prod7, economy6, etc (30 of these!)
gandhi: growth 10, expansion7, military prod4, gp birth rate6 etc. (30 of these!)

i also heard there will be a +/-2 for these flavors.

 

[J-man]

Ed Beach is responsible for the AI/
Beach showed the reported a simulation where 3 AI are on an island. Two are at war with each other. On of the two was so busy fighting that it let a city poorly defended which conquered by the third AI.

There are 30 flavors that the AI can have. (So an individual AI doesn't have 30 flavors, just a selection of them.)

Persians are mentioned. I first thought that Kijk might have confused them with the Arabs because in the article it says they have Arabian music.

Interface is in Art Deco.

There are pictures in it of: The Hanging Gardens, The Hagia Sophia, The Forbidden City and a building I don't recognize (It's a Greek or Roman building)