The best thing about BERT being released

The next big announcement has GOT TO BE CiVI.

Any guesses on when? When's the next big trade show?

Actually, there will be a lot of hoo ha about XCOM2 before it's all said and done

Sherlock said:

The next big announcement has GOT TO BE CiVI.

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Nothing personal, but this is one of the problems with the gaming industry: A willingness to lap up anything that has a specific name on it. There hasn't really been any technology breakthroughs since Civ 5. In fact, Civ 5 isn't even 64-bit. They'd do a LOT more for the series by doing this than spitting out a sequel with no major improvements to the series to justify one. I'm pretty sure I had read somewhere that they said they wouldn't make a sequel unless they had some major addition to give to the series.

Dushku said:

Nothing personal, but this is one of the problems with the gaming industry: A willingness to lap up anything that has a specific name on it. There hasn't really been any technology breakthroughs since Civ 5. In fact, Civ 5 isn't even 64-bit. They'd do a LOT more for the series by doing this than spitting out a sequel with no major improvements to the series to justify one. I'm pretty sure I had read somewhere that they said they wouldn't make a sequel unless they had some major addition to give to the series.

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Civ is a license to print money. There will be another.

Sherlock said:

Civ is a license to print money. There will be another.

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This is what I'm talking about. You're so eager for Civ 6 that you didn't even read what you assumed was anti-Civ 6.

I never said that on a long enough scale, there will never be a Civ 6. I said that wanting it before you know anything about it other than it will be called Civilization leads to a "license to make a partial/unsatisfying game."

64-bit software was not a fad back in 2010. Civ 5 is a game that relies more on memory and CPU than graphics. To not make the game 64-bit is a huge mistake. So large that to not address it despite numerous DLC, xpacs, and patches later is catastrophic. Don't take my word for it. Look at this recent thread where people come right out and say they don't play Civ 5 for this reason.

This does not inspire in me any confidence that Civ 6 will be worth buying. Especially given their track record of intentionally releasing a partial game. Go back and read the game reviews of vanilla Civ 5 and you'll see almost unanimously that it doesn't hold a candle to Civ 4. If people were more willing to say, "No, you have to release a real, full game if you want my money," game makers would have to make more of an effort. I would've loved the option to pay $150 for 64-bit Civ 5 Complete Edition back on its original release date. Because the game would delivered that level of value. Compare this to a $50 32-bit Civ 5 vanilla. There is no comparison.

It's so very far from perfect, but no one does it better.

Theres more to talk about. With bert released, there will be a lot more to talk about in the bert forum. To me thats awesome.

Dushku said:

Nothing personal, but this is one of the problems with the gaming industry: A willingness to lap up anything that has a specific name on it. There hasn't really been any technology breakthroughs since Civ 5. In fact, Civ 5 isn't even 64-bit.

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I don't understand your reasoning at all. First you say no major tech advances has been done since Civ5 (hence arguing as I see it: No need for Civ6). Then you say it's a major problem that Civ5 is not 64 bit (thus: Making a great argument for an advancement for Civ6). I'm confused.

kaspergm said:

I don't understand your reasoning at all. First you say no major tech advances has been done since Civ5 (hence arguing as I see it: No need for Civ6). Then you say it's a major problem that Civ5 is not 64 bit (thus: Making a great argument for an advancement for Civ6). I'm confused.

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You're not the only one.

But I'm happy knowing we're one step closer to CiVI (and I bet it will be 64 bit!).

Dushku said:

This is what I'm talking about. You're so eager for Civ 6 that you didn't even read what you assumed was anti-Civ 6.

I never said that on a long enough scale, there will never be a Civ 6. I said that wanting it before you know anything about it other than it will be called Civilization leads to a "license to make a partial/unsatisfying game."

64-bit software was not a fad back in 2010. Civ 5 is a game that relies more on memory and CPU than graphics. To not make the game 64-bit is a huge mistake. So large that to not address it despite numerous DLC, xpacs, and patches later is catastrophic. Don't take my word for it. Look at this recent thread where people come right out and say they don't play Civ 5 for this reason.

This does not inspire in me any confidence that Civ 6 will be worth buying. Especially given their track record of intentionally releasing a partial game. Go back and read the game reviews of vanilla Civ 5 and you'll see almost unanimously that it doesn't hold a candle to Civ 4. If people were more willing to say, "No, you have to release a real, full game if you want my money," game makers would have to make more of an effort. I would've loved the option to pay $150 for 64-bit Civ 5 Complete Edition back on its original release date. Because the game would delivered that level of value. Compare this to a $50 32-bit Civ 5 vanilla. There is no comparison.

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AFAIK switching to 64 bits may allow larger map and other memory related improvements, but I don't see how it will make the game run faster than a 32 bits version.

Gedemon said:

AFAIK switching to 64 bits may allow larger map and other memory related improvements, but I don't see how it will make the game run faster than a 32 bits version.

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I have an i7-4770 and the game doesn't use but maybe 1/8 to 1/4 of it. I used to think it was artificially capping itself until bc1 pointed out the memory limitation of 32-bit addressing.

@kaspergm: I don't see the confusion. 64-bit Civ 5 wouldn't be called Civ 6.

@Dushku You seem to be stuck on the 32-bit vs 64-bit. Actually all that it does it is limiting the memory to 4GB (because you can't address more memory on 32 bits, you can only count from 0 to 4294967295, and if you assign for each byte a number from 0 to that you would only get 4GB), but this does not slow down things by a significant amount.

I highly doubt there are many 64 bits operations being made, or that there is reason to calculate things on 64 bits: you don't work with big numbers, and you don't need double precision for floating point operations (it's a turn based strategy after all). So the biggest perk you are getting from 64-bits is being able to use more memory, but I don't even think civ 5 needs more than 4GB of memory. Making an app on 64 bits lets you do more but it also won't allow users to play the game on a 32-bit OS, and I am sure there are a lot of people who still use 32-bit Win7. Sure you can throw down an infinite amount of memory (64 bits can address, in theory, 16 Exabytes of memory which I can't even comprehend), but if the code is poorly optimized the game will still be slow.

In reality what slows thing down is poor use of parallel processing (you mention having a 4 core CPU but the game probably doesn't use all the cores effectively). Thread programming is a lot harder than serial programming and the development costs are very high, especially if you want an optimized code, so many games (or apps) that use multiple cores don't use all the cores to the maximum capability.

Now to get back on topic, you say that in order for civ6 to be launched it has to bring a new thing to the table, but this doesn't really mean something technological, what civ 6 should bring is new gameplay mechanics, that's what makes a game. Because nowadays there are pretty cheap game engines that are very well optimized, the technology is not really the limit but rather the creativity of the designers.

Fair enough. Until it was pointed out that the game is only 32-bit, I always just assumed it was poorly optimized anyways. I've read accounts of people running Civ 5 out of a RAMDISK with almost no advantages over an SSD. This simply shouldn't be the case! I have 32 GB of RAM, so I find it hard to believe that if the game was able to use more it wouldn't at least be somewhat faster.

Anyways, my main point is that while I love Civ 5, it doesn't instill in me a confidence that Civ 6 would be worth my money just because it's called Civ. I have yet to hear anybody reassure me that BE was much better optimized, so Firaxis got their game together and Civ 6 would run very well on high end machines.

Dushku said:

I've read accounts of people running Civ 5 out of a RAMDISK with almost no advantages over an SSD. This simply shouldn't be the case! I have 32 GB of RAM, so I find it hard to believe that if the game was able to use more it wouldn't at least be somewhat faster.

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This is further proof that code optimization is the problem with the low performance in civ 5. From a memory point of view this is actually a good thing, it means that Input/Output operations are optimized, the game is loading most of the required data into RAM so it rarely has to read slow devices like HDDs or SSDs (meaning that it doesn't matter that much if you use a HDD, SSD or RAMDISK since the reading form the device was not a problem in the first place). This means that an increase in memory won't do anything since the game already uses the available memory pretty well.

Dushku said:

Fair enough. Until it was pointed out that the game is only 32-bit, I always just assumed it was poorly optimized anyways. I've read accounts of people running Civ 5 out of a RAMDISK with almost no advantages over an SSD. This simply shouldn't be the case! I have 32 GB of RAM, so I find it hard to believe that if the game was able to use more it wouldn't at least be somewhat faster.

Anyways, my main point is that while I love Civ 5, it doesn't instill in me a confidence that Civ 6 would be worth my money just because it's called Civ. I have yet to hear anybody reassure me that BE was much better optimized, so Firaxis got their game together and Civ 6 would run very well on high end machines.

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From my point of view, the technical question is not what's important at all. Yes, Civ5 does take (unreasonable) long time to load, but this is a minor quible. Yes, it does seem to tax my computer more than one would expect, but it's not a critical issue.

As I see it, the reason we should look forward to Civ6 is for what it brings the game in terms of game design. Much as I love Civ5 (and I do love Civ5), it's an undeniable fact that AI does terribly with handling the 1UPT system, and I can understand why that has turned many long-term fans away from the series (even if it's not the case for me). Obviously that's a major issue for Civ6 to target. And then of course there's all the candy in terms of expanded game mechanics - the tech web of BE seems like an intriguing perspective for Civ6 and the policy system introduced with BnE Ideologies (combine your policy tree from a pool of policies) are promising perspective for the game, and the Espionage system of Civ5 is at best pitiful, leaving also major gaps for Civ6 to fill. If Civ4 was the crowning achievement of the "reboot" that Civ3 did, then in the same way we can hope that Civ6 will finish what Civ5 started.

Lay_Lay said:

It's so very far from perfect, but no one does it better.

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Ermm, may I politely suggest that you take a perusal at any of the Ageod games, or for that matter, perhaps GalCiv III. Different opinions and such bro .

kaspergm said:

the reason we should look forward to Civ6 is for what it brings the game in terms of game design.

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And what does it bring to the game in terms of game design? This was my point. We don't know anything about it other than it would be called Civ. You went on to list areas in need of improvement, but this only reinforces my point that improving Civ 5 would be a more prudent focus than leaving it unfinished to put out the next, partial, will never be finished game because there will be X people who will buy it in spite of all that just because it's called Civ.

kaspergm said:

the tech web of BE seems like an intriguing perspective for Civ6

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From what I've read, the tech web was BE's biggest mistake. Admittedly, I've never played BE, but this is an alternate viewpoint. It wouldn't fit into a less fantasy, more historical game because certain techs requiring certain requisite techs is representative.

Dushku is absolutely right though, 64bit would optimize hardware and reduce loading times

Dushku said:

You went on to list areas in need of improvement, but this only reinforces my point that improving Civ 5 would be a more prudent focus than leaving it unfinished to put out the next, partial, will never be finished game because there will be X people who will buy it in spite of all that just because it's called Civ.(...)

From what I've read, the tech web was BE's biggest mistake. Admittedly, I've never played BE, but this is an alternate viewpoint. It wouldn't fit into a less fantasy, more historical game because certain techs requiring certain requisite techs is representative.

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I have been advocating for a third expansion pack for Civ5 as much as anybody, but that does seem like a moot point by now, chances of that happening are all but zero. Plus, a functional AI will probably require a new game. Anyway, I don't see much point in discussing this, I'm simply making the points about why I'm excitet about the possible prospect of a Civ6 anouncement, it's entirely acceptable for you to feel differently.

About the tech web, I haven't played BE myself either, so I don't know how (well) it's implemented there, but from a general design pov. the idea of an actual 2D (or even 2.5 D) tech web instead of the current more or less 1D tree is something that at least in theory opens a lot of possibilities for the game.

Lol, I must've refreshed the page at the very moment you posted The time stamp was 2 minutes behind my clock.

kaspergm said:

I have been advocating for a third expansion pack for Civ5 as much as anybody, but that does seem like a moot point by now, chances of that happening are all but zero.

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Right, and my point was this is our fault. For not demanding more from games. For being eager for Game X when Game X-1 was incomplete. For being eager for Game X just because it's called Game.

I agree that we're free to disagree. But it sounds like we don't disagree about the game(s), but rather what we're willing to pay for. Some people might get handed a half full Coke in the drive thru and be ready for their next visit. I'm the guy that taps on the window and asks them to fill it up. It's what I paid for after all.