bvanevery
Warlord
so they compromise by bringing out a lazy, badly working product that should for all intents and purposes be stripped and rebuilt from scratch. [...]
Also, my point was that they should not have released CiV, not that I actually expect them to redo the whole thing,
Ok, it sounds like you wanted them to ship a "perfect" or significantly better game, in the release cycle they actually had. Once you make a pile of mistakes in development it just isn't possible to stop everything you're doing and ship something completely different. Not without losing a lot of money, which can cause the business to fold, or never do another game in a particular franchise again. I'm not apologizing for the failings of Civ, they are what they are. I'm just trying to impress upon you that there are limits to what can be changed "when you see something is wrong."
Now, when they're making the next version of the game, they have the benefit of hindsight. Hopefully they do something better. So how did the game actually improve from Civ IV to V?
- They got rid of all those ridiculous religions. We did not need another 6 possible city improvements to clutter and slow down our mouseclicking time.
- They got rid of a combat system that heavily favors defenders. It's damn boring having to buy every single kind of unit to mount an attack, lest the defenders have the right kind of unit to wipe out your force. Even when you come prepared, you're going to lose all of unit type X that you initially attack with.
I don't expect them to do much more than this between revs of the game. Wild changes push it into "not Civ" territory pretty quickly. That's my job, not Firaxis'.
If you have specific, concrete ideas on what your ideal Civ game would look like, I'd like to discuss them somewhere. I'm not sure what the right place around here is.
To make a Star Wars comparison: Phantom Menace was atrocious. Attack of the Clones wasn't nearly as bad. They got rid of Jar-Jar and dealt more with the darkness of the original story, such as Anakin slaughtering the sand people, and the existence of a secret clone army. AotC unfortunately was marred by Anakin's ridiculous love dialogue. I kid you not, when I saw it in the theater someone said out loud "Oh my god, what is this supposed to be, Shakespeare?" Nobody objected to this person speaking out loud in the movie because we all were in so much pain listening to Anakin's angst. So they corrected an old mistake... and then made a new one. Oh well! You can do all sorts of course corrections between films, but you can't change the fact that George Lucas is deficient as a screenwriter. He's gonna screw up something; I guess he's not willing to take input from people who write better than he does.