The Civilization Franchise- dead?

I think TV Tropes can say it better than I can:

God, No! A moment that you don't like has happened in your favorite fictional series! A new character appeared out of nowhere! Or your favorite character got the Idiot Ball that week! Or there is a Musical Episode not written by Joss Whedon!

The shark has been jumped over! Your show is now Ruined FOREVER!!!

What? Ruined forever?! Get A Hold Of Yourself Man!

Sure, it might have been a dumb moment, but how do you truly know until the series has run its course? What if the new character turns out to not be The Scrappy, as you feared? What if your favorite character is never handed the Idiot Ball again? What if the plot for that BLAM Episode was Just for Fun, and the rest of the series sticks to what it does best?

The show isn't made by gods (despite what some may assume). People make mistakes. Shows can have low points but still have high quality throughout the run.

Just take a few deep breaths. You may think you have seen a clear Jumping the Shark, but those are rare moments. Take the actual Jumping The Shark from Happy Days. That moment was clear for at least three reasons:

It was completely against the premise of the show, which was a loving homage to the last generation.
Fonzie was no longer the Breakout Character who was a role model to some; now he had mutated into a full-fledged Canon Sue.
It was identified upon retrospect 20 years later, meaning it had the benefit of hindsight and it wasn't a knee-jerk reaction.

How could the show fix that without ignoring the episode completely? There are plenty of other ways to jump the shark, but those are rare diamonds of crap... in the rough of crap. It's near impossible to tell when a show has jumped the shark until after the fact. The variety of the votes on Jump The Shark are a testament to that. Worse, if people are just rushing to declare jumping the shark for any moment they don't like, it comes across as Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.
 
I don't have any reason to believe that Civ 5 is unsuccessful from a profitability standpoint. In fact all that gimmicky DLC seems like printing money, even if I and others perceive it as milking the fan base. My sense is that Civilization will spawn at least one more sequel. The fans are still interested in the game, they just need a non-polarizing sequel to unite them.

I'd consider DLC one of the greatest crimes against strategy games ever conceived. Milking the fan base is a polite way to put it, but I'd imagine the only reason the game producers put up with the fans complaining about it is the marginal return on producing DLC (which I expect is quite high).

If they feel dumbing the game down or graphics priority will sell more, it's their prerogative and others will have to prove otherwise with their own games. However, no matter what game one makes, it should actually work. THAT is the biggest disgrace about civ V and it hangs like a black cloud over firaxis; their flagship title has core features not working for over a year...all the while making serious UI and game-engine (run speed, time between turns) gaffes.

...

Even AVGN knows the most important part of a game is being able to play it! Seeing a 2010 title screw up basic controls worse than MUCH lower budget titles from the comparatively early PC gaming days is seriously sour.

Definitely agree here. Difficulty should come from the opponents and from the nature of the game, not because you are handicapped and can't control your pieces. Another example, relating to the governor problem: what if a chess piece decided to not move after you told it to? Or decided to move somewhere else because what do you know?

Civ AI does not play civ IV or civ V. It plays a different game entirely, having almost nothing to do with achieving the very victory conditions the game itself defines.

In defense of the designers, the AI got much better from Civ2 to Civ3 to Civ4, and even in Civ4 they were including ideas from the BetterAI mod into patches on BtS. That was a good move. Then they hit each other in the head with a sledgehammer, and regressed.



Civ isn't dead though. There will probably be another, and if they bomb two in a row then the franchise could die.
 
the difficulty in civ 4 ranges from "I am kicking ass while asleep and drunk at the same time" (anything below Immortal) to "BALLS TO THE WALLS HARD OH GOD THE AI OUTNUMBERS ME 10000000:1!!!!" (above Immortal).

Of course this difficulty is only influenced by the amount of bonuses the AI gets and has nothing to do with it's actual strategy or tactics (which somehow succeed at being both random and predictable at the same time).

I think more appropriate names for the AI levels, would be to do away with the various titles of Emperor, Immortal, etc. and to instead replace them with various phylum' of Cnidaria. So for example Emperor level difficulty level would be replaced with "Jellyfish" difficulty, Monarch would be replaced with "Sea Sponge" difficulty and so on. This new naming scheme would more accurately reflect the levels of intelligence displayed by the AI (although not accurately enough, because frankly it would be giving the AI a little bit too much credit (and by that I actually mean an excessively large amount of credit)).
 
Civ isn't dead though. There will probably be another, and if they bomb two in a row then the franchise could die.

You can't permanently kill a good idea. We might lose new games for a while, but eventually either new project management staffing at firaxis will put together a competent programming/design/UI package or someone else will get the IP and revive TBS.

TBS has had some AMAZING games in its past. Warlords 1-3, HOMM 2 and 3 are both extremely top-tier classic series...but at one point the core designers on each series split. There's no reason to believe people (old or new) can't make magic again though. Civ needs some really good competition, and it starts with making the games properly.

It's a shame. It's rare to have design as good as in civ IV, it really is. Much as I have distaste for the direction soren johnson took the AI in civ IV, the choices in the game are pretty deep.

To SOME extent, however, civ has never seen its victory conditions balanced (I've yet to encounter a civ game where equally skilled players could pursue a military victory vs an alternative victory and have roughly the same chances). It's probably pretty hard to make an AI for such an environment, but I'd have still liked them to have it pick some basic patterns that pursue victory. BBAI is actually a lot more complex than I'd have advocated, given the state of the game's controls/basic functioning.
 
Civ isn't dead though. There will probably be another, and if they bomb two in a row then the franchise could die.

Civ Revolution, Civ 5, Civ for facebook kiddies. :(

If it were just civ rev and civ facebook I could say ok, they're just trying to make some spinoffs to dupe some people out of money, but they made the sequel, the main line of the series in to one of the games that followed this theme. And it's not just like they made some mechanics that didn't go over well with the fanbase, it was the whole premise of the DLC, the whole super huge graphics engine that doesn't look great but aparently is the Most Important Component Ever and still runs like crap, etc.

The fact that they decided that they didn't want to follow the main strategy theme that made the series and go with a tactic combat game could almost be forgiven if it was the only mistake, but we're fooling ourselves if we claim that.
 
I guess it speaks to my view of the series that I didn't even count CivRev or the Facebook Civ when making my post.

As TMIT said, the basic game concepts behind Civ are solid, and they make for a fascinating game. Someone will pick up the pieces and put a good one together eventually. Until then, I'll probably be playing Paradox/AGEod games and Civ4. :)
 
you cant put civ rev and civ V in the same category. Civ V was a complete disaster while the only problems with civ rev was the lack of choices at some places(you always have 4 opponents, 5 levels of difficulty). Otherwise, it was civ 1 with better graphism (and on console).
 
Putting Civ Rev and CiV in the same category is like spitting on the giant team that spent countless hours trying to make the game perfect.
 
People are defending civ rev. o.O
 
That's a link to the Civ 4 C&C forum. Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't know what you mean.

The future of Civ won't be written by Firaxis but rather by the modding community, you can forget about a new Civilization being as interesting and as strategy-requiring as the ones before Civ5, the only thing left is what modders will do.
 
The future of Civ won't be written by Firaxis but rather by the modding community, you can forget about a new Civilization being as interesting and as strategy-requiring as the ones before Civ5, the only thing left is what modders will do.

Hey, thanks for lifting my spirits. :rolleyes:
 
Civ 6
Unfortunately some of the good images were deleted, as they were linked to a 2k thread, which was deleted.
Old thread is old :p I think that thread sums pretty well the feelings of atleast half of the civ community at the time ...
The future of Civ won't be written by Firaxis but rather by the modding community, you can forget about a new Civilization being as interesting and as strategy-requiring as the ones before Civ5, the only thing left is what modders will do.
Well, the future of TBS is definitely on the hands of gamedesigners that know how to mod ( like Soren did ). We already had a ex-modder with a cool "Let's make a hybrid between Ol'civ and PG" idea designing a civ game and we got Civ V :D

On the Civ franchise ... well, CivWorld is definitely not a TBS in any sense of the term, Civ V is a step back in terms of AI understanding of the game it is playing ( really, even civ III AI understands it's game better and we're talking of a AI that allowed kill zones ) besides some ( sometimes not so ) subtle issues introduced by the square->hex conversion and CivRev is quite shallow for a TBS. So, the short term prospect is not famous :p
 
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