Boredom with CIV5 demystified

Harvestmoon said:

Wow, that's... that's what defines a good writer.
All of your arguments are now invalidated, as your perception of reality has been called highly into question by this statement.

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That's not true. HAve you never read a book with a great scenario or world, but the way the writers write is so annoying you simply can't like it?
Dunno, but with me this happened some times.

moscaverde said:

That's not true. HAve you never read a book with a great scenario or world, but the way the writers write is so annoying you simply can't like it?
Dunno, but with me this happened some times.

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If the writer is annoying, the scenario or world can't be great. I'm not sure how you can have both.
Any story I've ever enjoyed as an experience of a fictional world has been told by a good writer. If the writing is awful, the story is awful; if the story is awful, its elements aren't conveyed in a way that isn't awful.

Harvestmoon said:

If the writer is annoying, the scenario or world can't be great. I'm not sure how you can have both.
Any story I've ever enjoyed as an experience of a fictional world has been told by a good writer. If the writing is awful, the story is awful; if the story is awful, its elements aren't conveyed in a way that isn't awful.

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Tolkien is a perfect example how you're wrong. His brilliant linguistics, attention to every single minor detail in architecture, clothing etc. provides a massive and very believeable world you can immerse yourself into. However, Lord of the Rings as a book can be soo boring at times that it borders the unbearable. I have yet to meet a Tolkien fan who doesn't agree with me and believe me I know quite a few.

Bibor said:

Tolkien is a perfect example how you're wrong. His brilliant linguistics, attention to every single minor detail in architecture, clothing etc. provides a massive and very believeable world you can immerse yourself into. However, Lord of the Rings as a book can be soo boring at times that it borders the unbearable. I have yet to meet a Tolkien fan who doesn't agree with me and believe me I know quite a few.

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Agree.
I loved Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and read both a number of times. However there are parts that I tend to skip over every time (the poetry and songs in particular)
Beyond these two books, Bibor's point becomes more evident. The Silmarillion is very tedious to read.
In a similar vein I found it difficult to continue reading the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. The first 4 to 5 books were very interesting, after that things seemed to get bogged down in details (from what I remember the story splits into a number of different story lines) and the entire series is up to 13, 14? books now.
Just my two cents

Bibor said:

Tolkien is a perfect example how you're wrong. His brilliant linguistics, attention to every single minor detail in architecture, clothing etc. provides a massive and very believeable world you can immerse yourself into. However, Lord of the Rings as a book can be soo boring at times that it borders the unbearable. I have yet to meet a Tolkien fan who doesn't agree with me and believe me I know quite a few.

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Yet another example of your unilateral subjectivism being presented as fact. You don't like Tolkien? Fine. But that doesn't make him a bad writer. He's a world-renown writer of very high repute; his works have defined an entire genre of writing. He's a good writer.

You're just not big on reading details. Big difference.

Martin Alvito said:

It's going to take a lot of work on combat. If that fails, coding optimization should eventually make it possible to play larger maps with fewer than the default number of civs, which would create some elbow room.

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I've come to the conclusion (nudged by luddite, I guess) that just working on combat won't do the trick. 1upt works in games like Panzer General or Battle for Wesnoth but there you have a lot more tiles and much higher movement. The higher movement means that you can much more easily flank and move units through each other, protect other units, create a strong formation and so on. In Civ5, choke points are so small and movement so low that you can't expect to stay in formation except with fleets. Moving large armies is a nightmare anyways because the auto-move is broken whenever a unit crosses your path, you can only trickle units through a narrow space and there is no selection of multiple units, not even daring to dream of a move in formation mode.

I also tinkered a lot with combat values in the last two weeks and it's extremely hard to find a good balance that doesn't produce very undesirable tendencies in playstyle. In fact, the devs in my opinion found a certain local optimum with their combat rules, but it's not one I enjoy much. If you remove the flatland penalty, defensive formation turtling becomes the best option (a line of melee supported by archers or siege, fortify the line and range attack from behind). With the flatland penalty, formations become very undesirable and you just sit behind rivers waiting for the enemy to come to you, though, which isn't very great, either - in fact I would argue it's worse. Add pretty fast healing speeds and move after attacking and you get a game where attacking suddenly becomes very unattractive if the enemy knows what they're doing.

If much larger maps were playable with larger spacing, you'd have to rework the whole game mechanics to fit them. Cities would need a higher minimum spacing and be able to work more tiles, so you'd need higher citizen counts and larger culture borders. You would also need protective buildings outside of cities to provide ZoC and prevent enemies zipping through your land and pillaging. Units would have to be massively cheaper.

I think it could work, and in fact would love it, but I doubt it will happen in this incarnation of the game as the amount of work involved is simply staggering.

Quite a good analysis.

Civilization II was great but designed by Brian Reynolds. Colonization was designed by Brian Reynolds. Alpha Centauri was designed by Brian Reynolds. Railroad Tycoon 2 (arguably a billion times better than RRT 1 and the best in the series by far) was designed by Pop Top Software. Civilization 4 was designed by Soren Johnson.

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Where are those people now? Does anyone know anything about their new projects?

My 2c:

This game is boring atm because it's so easy due to poor combat AI and no real decision penalties.

There are some good innovations with this game though (1upt, SPs, hexes) that I really like, and I sincerely hope patches and mods can utilize these innovations to their fullest potential with time. This game hasn't been out too long after all.

Currently I'm fielding ideas and planning a massive mod of my own. Whether or not it ever comes to fruition only time will tell.

Bibor, you nailed it: the combat of CiV is easily the best of the series, but when every other element pales in comparison to CivIV, everything falls apart. I've been trying to figure out for a long time why I couldn't get into CiV like I did with it's predecessor, and I think you've nailed it: rewards are not distributed properly, and I just don't feel the impact of my decisions on a 4X level like I did before: it doesn't seem like non-combat strategy is that big of a deal, and that is sorely needed in a 4X game, otherwise it might as well be an RTS (and CiV fails there because it's turn-based, which hurts the pacing of combat in comparison)

Shurdus said:

There already? I stopped reading at "to understand civ5 we need to look at Super Mario. "

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Are you suggesting that Super Mario isn't a well-designed game? The point the OP is trying to make is that there are basic fundamentals of game design that don't change, no matter what year the game is released or what technology is available to implement a design.

redmosquito said:

Where are those people now? Does anyone know anything about their new projects?

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Yeah..Reynolds is at Zynga: they make farmville, a very addictive game no doubt, but a (imo) dishonest marketing system (pay2play is abominable for gaming).

I've rediscovered this thread soon after I've rediscovered CiV with the latest patch balance change. And I think the devs had, too. Some of the complaints are obviously addressed.

Linearity in Social Policies, for example. The addition of culture-producing bonuses to all the threes starting "trees" deals with the problem of being locked in a particular tree/gamestyle with little means to switch.

The Wonders are clearly being made more useful and rewarding.

The things the OP has mentioned aren't mechanical problems (except for the AI, naturally), so for instance to make wonder and technology choices more interesting, mods could solve that. So it would still be a game with potential, specially if modders are given access to the DLL.

Yeah OP is right about over-rewarding. In Civ, being on the road to winning is far from rewarding or satisfying. In every Civ i ever played I always quit the given SP game once it was clear I would win. It's the struggle, the difficulties, which are rewarding. They really stuffed up CIV5- its just an empty shell designed for the masses..

If you think the OP was about some linearity problems with wonders and SP's, I think we've been readin different threads.
Glad this thread got resurrected, very interesting read and most likely the reason CiV is such a massibe failure, I've had the idea that Firaxis nor Schafer really knows what they're doing for a while now, this thread gives a very good explanation for this phenomenon.
It's just a bit depressing to think that unless Firaxis boots Schafer, which considering Schafers portfolio is not likely to happen, it'll be very hard for them to make another game that is as complex and well designed as CIV.

And as a side note, Asimov's Foundation series is a work of art, despite what he himself thought about, being highly critical of your own work is normal as a writer, just look at Kafka.

Very good post by Bibor. I think he addressed some of the fundamental problems with why Civilization 5 is such a dull game. It was also done in a constructive way that everyone in this community can appreciate.

I agree with almost all of what he said except about Civ I. Although it was not perfect by any means, it was a genre defining game that is still fun to play to this day. Well, at least for me it is.

Derpy Hooves said:

It's just a bit depressing to think that unless Firaxis boots Schafer, which considering Schafers portfolio is not likely to happen, it'll be very hard for them to make another game that is as complex and well designed as CIV.

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Didn't he leave at the end of 2010 go to Stardock?

As a designer, I disagree with most of Bibor's analysis, in that it is too simplistic and incomplete. Positive: identifies decision making as being crucial. Negative: bashes a game designer/company with little concrete argument(and presumption of more expertise?). Principles 1-4 are just too shallow unless applied in a more specific way. It's like asking what the meaning of life is. There are a hundred answers - the question itself is just too vague to be useful.

Anyway, unless we're going to write pages and pages of analysis, nevermind that there are many books on the subject of game design, I'll try and be as short as possible with what I think. Most of the complaints about Civ5 are/were about it being boring or "dumbed down". Bibor talks about decision-making and its consequences - exactly the right subject. Everyone seems to compare Civ4 and Civ5 so let's go with that. Civ4 definitely had its big consequences. These were the product of the mechanics, for better or for worse. Then what happened? Civ5 came along and is much less volatile. So much of the mechanics from Civ4 were smoothed over and made much more salient. Civ5's technical mechanics are not nearly as flawed on a design level - lessons learned, etc (Stacks of doom, binary combat, collateral damage/suicide, the slider, the whip, tile resources, Religion system interacting badly with diplomacy and not compatible with optimal play. I could go on, and each one of these deserves its own essay on which effects are poisonous to decision-making). So, with that "smoothing over", the feel of Civ5, especially on release, could be very flat for a lot of people. There are still lots and lots of decisions to make with differing levels of optimality and effect, but the results are harder to see. As an analyzing nerd, I got everything I needed to keep me busy and I got new innovations and nicer mechanics. For others, they got uniform, uninteresting turn-by-turn clicking through the game with no crazy stuff going on.

The patches have improved this for everyone. They're definitely the right direction. There is so much more early power available now - early decisions that mean big things for your civ. The ball gets rolling sooner and it's more diverse.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the AI. Probably the single biggest thing holding gameplay back. It may be at a level that a lot of people just find it hard to have fun with. I'd work on the AI myself if the game dll were opened up (not too long now, I hope). Just remember, the Civ5 AI is better, on a technical level, than the Civ4 AI. 1UPT is a lot more demanding vs a human than SoDs. Also, vanilla Civ4's AI was even worse, if you remember.

I never played CIV I, so I can't say if it was a good game or not.

But try playing Warcraft I after playing Warcraft II. Roads.....my god I hate roads!

Bibor said:

Tolkien is a perfect example how you're wrong. His brilliant linguistics, attention to every single minor detail in architecture, clothing etc. provides a massive and very believeable world you can immerse yourself into. However, Lord of the Rings as a book can be soo boring at times that it borders the unbearable. I have yet to meet a Tolkien fan who doesn't agree with me and believe me I know quite a few.

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Agreed completely. The chapter "The Council of Elrond" is almost unreadable.
It took me forever to get through that one chapter when I first read the trilogy because it was so... so... Tolkien.

The Lord of the Rings is a lot of peoples favorite story of all time while at the same time not being their favorite book. Kind of a strange paradox.