The (failed) VIP group (Gamescom, again)

We're back .
And how i had to see, my photo is crap, you can't see anything on the images .
Haven't checked out the photos on my mobil phone, i have some problems with the bluetooth adapter.


I'll first shortly write down the important aspects, and afterwards some bigger blabla will follow.

Facts:
- Interface is partially crap, especially in view on tech choice/tech tree. Short description: You get a new technology, it pops up. Then you close the popup in the middle of the screen and...nothing. You click then on the right on hte science notification, then you have to click at the left on the technologies/click to get the tech tree, and then on the tech tree you click again probably somewhere at the rigt. Sorry guys, but that's crap, please change that. Let the tech tree directly pop up, and give the user the option to choose nothing and get a reminder at the end of the round.
- The minimap is not very helpful
- The turn times seem to be rather long for the played maps
- But the game itself goes fast on. Probably many people will now play longer game speeds than standard
- I didn't feel "one more turn", but i also didn't feel it at the begin of Civ4/3/2. But you can play a hour without noticing it, that probably also says something.
- Hiding diplomay infos doesn't work. You don't have an overview, and not enough feeback (read more at the end)
- Marking the units with a light flash doesn't work, i've always been searching for my units.
- Same for cities, i had problems to notice them on the map. The split overview in the cities is imho also not good.
- Also not nice: When a city finished something, you only get a notice, that it needs new order, but it is not said, what has been produced. In combination with the not easy to find units, this is really annoying.

gameplay:
- 1UpT+Cities: If there's no unit in a city, you can just move an unit on it, which will automatically vanish and is absorbed by the city, but you'll still see the units button. If you click again on the button, you can normally move the unit out of the city.
- If there is an unit in the city, and the city has produced a new one, you are forced to move one unit out. Else you can't finish the turn.
- Naval units can kill land units via bombardment
- City states: You have influence on city states, which determines your relationship to them. The influence degrades over time, and it degrades faster, if you're not a friend of the city state and you move your units into its borders. If you're a friend, this is not a problem.
- Looked at "Remove starting bias": It seems, that normally the civs are distributed in a special connection to the terrain, and that this option removes this. E.g. normally the english start near the water, the Iroquis in the woods, and this option removes that.
- The leaders don't only speak the words at the beginning, you also get a sound reply for other things (not sure if for all, has been loud there)
- You can change the language of the ingame text and ingame sound independendly. So i could play with german text and english text quotes or vice versa.
- You can embark your units everywhere (but the tooltip says only in friendly territory)
- There's still the distinction between coast/ocean in connection to unit movement. Your early ships (including transformed land units) can't move on ocean tiles
- I've seen different city stiles (japanese cities don't look like english cities)
- I didn't see different unit artstiles
- You can still chop woods down (mining is needed)

The whole thing was an early press build (the folder date said end of march), so not everything has been in.
@Modding:
- The XML look like...normal, like in Civ4, some differences, sure, but overall you'll see the parallels
- I haven't seen any connection leader <-> civilization in the XML files
- Map scripts and UI are done in lua
- Seems that for textures again the .dds format is used
- i could not find any 3D files .



So, now in longer:
First: Uaah, i'm completly powered out. I've sat in the car for 8 hours, the "Gießener Ring" is horrible, at the drive back there's been a car accident, my feet ache and i'm tired.

I've arrived around 12 o clock in Cologne (cost me some nerves), and searched first for the meeting point and looked then for the 2K stand. Many people have been there, but not for Civ, but for Mafia II. Well... i didn't have a problem with that .
I then went back to the meeting point, and say a guy with a red shirt, with hammer and sickle on it, ah, that has to be mark, and his wife (a lucky guy, i tell you!). A short welcoem, and then we went on, to find the others (was not complicated, Locutus green shirt was relativly obvious, and i've recognized Worf from some pictures). They already found user and his girlfriend, and later after a while Donald joined and we went to eat something (the food was expensive and not very good, but well, i didn't expect anything else). Afterwards we've "collected" jobe and Penny at the meeting point and went to 2K.
Sadly, there must have been some missunderstanding and we could not meet the guy, with whom the "deal" was made :
But okay, we had the option to play directly, and played and looked at the stuff. Worf alone has played for 2 hours .
I've stood besides of Mark, and watched him conquer the world (...okay, a bit) with Napoleon, looked a bit at the civilopedia, at the concepts, very nice.
And i had to explain the basic civ5 concepts to the newbies at the next computer. But even without any knowledge, i could not convice them to join the community to get some more news about civ :/.
At 4 around we went out for some other stuff, and then the group broke off.
I've then went through the halls, looked at different things like the career center and some presentation from one of the game magazins (Gamestar). Funnily (somehow), the most games were not really interesting for me.
Because of that, i then went back to civ, to play a game as Japan. This was a bit better, could recognize some things more, had a better overview, probably because i saw everything from the beginning.
The expansion was slow, and i didn't really have the complete overview, but i also didn't have it in the other civs at the beginning.
Then i've also more recognized the disadvantages in the diplomay. Before, with the french, i've gifted nearly everything i (or more Mark) had, including the city of Orlean (which revolted then for 6 rounds). Reaction was zero, no feedback, no change in the facial expression, nothing. the same afterwards as Japan, she was rude before some bigger gifts, and she was rude afterwards ("oh, you, your unworthyness. I've talked about you, nothing good, you can be sure"). Then i've gone terribly on Darius' nerves, i requested nearly everything from him...and i could not see anything, he looked afterwards the same.
And here, again sorry guys, this will not work in this way. You don't have any overview, you don't know what will affect your opponent, in which way, for how long, You somehow need an overview. Give me a list with the last X actions and what the result was, or let the foreign advisor appear to say some things ("he may be pissed of because of X,...", whatever).
Same for the relations to other civs. You don't have any idea, who is even in war with whom else, if you don't note it somewhere. I think it's mentioned at the civs itself, but a map overview is 1000 times better. We need some overview here. Seriously, else the diplomacy will horribly fail.
Additionally, i noticed some stupidity in the diplomacy. I've seen 3 times the AI canceling the open borders agreement, just to sign the same again in the next round .


...so, and the summray? Yes, it's Civ, somehow. Is it good? No idea, but i could have stood there for 2 hours more, just playing, and this probably says something. You'll have to change some of your habbits, but if this will work, you'll be able to see in the demo. Should not be that a big problem.


...ah...long text.
Please forgive me all the erros, it's late and i'm tired.

I hope Locutus will also say something .

Yes, the idea of hiding the diplomacy modifiers always seemed like a questionable choice; if there isn't any feedback, it's kind of hard to make meaningful decisions.

Though I suppose it kind of makes sense considering their overall design goal they mentioned with the civs. If they're "playing to win" and not to be governed by a set of modifiers, I supposed feedback is irrelevant as it's essentially no different than playing with a human.

If I give you all of my techs, you may smile and say thanks... but you'll still probably attack me if I build the apollo program.

Feedback is based on player expectation; "Hey.. i was nice to you, you should be nice to me" ~ emphasis on "should"... in civ4, unless civs made certain decisions before certain thresholds (like internally declaring war X turns before reaching the status that they "no longer declare war on"), the A.I. was enslaved by the modifiers.

I assume, in civ5, that is no longer the case. Therefore the feedback is essentially meaningless. It shouldn't matter if an A.I. has +15000 awesomeness toward you... if you're about to win in 50 turns, they should try and stop you. Even if you've been their friend for "centuries".

It removed the roleplay aspect in favor of a more competitive gaming aspect; Which has pros and cons and some people will like whilst others won't. Additionally, some probably won't even care or notice. Though it still follows the likely assumed laws; If I'm nice to an A.I. ~ that A.I. will be nice(er) to me (than other A.I.s) ~ an assumption we, as players, will always make whether we can see the modifiers or not. So technically, they're irrelevant; 'cause if our expectations are betrayed, we'll question why anyway. .

AriochIV said:

Yes, the idea of hiding the diplomacy modifiers always seemed like a questionable choice; if there isn't any feedback, it's kind of hard to make meaningful decisions.

Click to expand...

Particularly if the diplomacy is as flaky as the OP makes it out to be. Everything else he mentions, I can live with, but the diplomacy sounds a bit flawed still.

I might be wrong, but when you finished research in IV, it gave you a list of techs you could research, or gave you the ability to go to the tech tree and pick from there. Adding a few more clicks seems annoying, but not something game breaking.

King Jason said:

Though I suppose it kind of makes sense considering their overall design goal they mentioned with the civs. If they're "playing to win" and not to be governed by a set of modifiers, I supposed feedback is irrelevant as it's essentially no different than playing with a human.

If I give you all of my techs, you may smile and say thanks... but you'll still probably attack me if I build the apollo program.

Feedback is based on player expectation; "Hey.. i was nice to you, you should be nice to me" ~ emphasis on "should"... in civ4, unless civs made certain decisions before certain thresholds (like internally declaring war X turns before reaching the status that they "no longer declare war on"), the A.I. was enslaved by the modifiers.

I assume, in civ5, that is no longer the case. Therefore the feedback is essentially meaningless. It shouldn't matter if an A.I. has +15000 awesomeness toward you... if you're about to win in 50 turns, they should try and stop you. Even if you've been their friend for "centuries".

It removed the roleplay aspect in favor of a more competitive gaming aspect; Which has pros and cons and some people will like whilst others won't. Additionally, some probably won't even care or notice.

Click to expand...

This. If you're a soft target, then gifting a bunch of stuff won't affect whether they attack you/like you. In this sense, they're more like people, as your worst enemy isn't going to stop plotting war if you try to bribe them off. It sounds like AIs have more variation in their personalities, and can/will attempt to take you out if you're going to win and they're not your superbest friend.

IMO, it's a good thing that the Civ 4 "I can play the whole game with little to no military until I want to attack" shtick is gone. I mean, with proper diplo management, you could simply ignore other AIs (The ones that wouldn't attack at pleased), and always know if war was a possibility (Which is the main problem with too much transparency). I'm sure it'll be a difficult changeover from Civ 4, but ultimately isn't having a more challenging, but still fair game better?

As I final note, I urge people to not forget that this is an (evidently very old) press build. The AI is always being changed/poked around with, so a lot of 'flaky' behavior is probably the result of buggy coding at this stage.

You'd think they'd have shown a more polished version to the guys representing the biggest Civ fansite. This is a little scary, I hope that demo has enough content to convince me that all the negatives here are a result of it being an early build.

Your report really worries me .

I didn't think removing diplomatic modifiers was a big deal at first, but now I think we really do need them. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I don't want the AI to act exactly like a human (especially not an extremely flaky and illogical human). I'm all in favor of the AI being a little more cutthroat and opportunistic, but it would totally break the immersion if your longtime ally declared war on you because you started building a spaceship or a utopia.

alanthreonus said:

Your report really worries me .

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It worries me that they're using a build from march now? Surely the game has changed considerably since then.

It's also odd that the OP's experiences are so different from just about everyone else's that've played.

So, really, just wanna try it for myself anymore. Bring it on!

Diplomacy is supposed to be a key point in the game, so I kinda doubt it's as lame more recent builds. I personally always thought Civ IV's system of telling you exactly what was going to be a little ridiculous, but obviously having NO indicators won't work.

AriochIV said:

Yes, the idea of hiding the diplomacy modifiers always seemed like a questionable choice; if there isn't any feedback, it's kind of hard to make meaningful decisions.

Click to expand...

It's an issue only if the data we're looking for isn't found elsewhere. So if the AI is acting like a jerk they basically just need to tell you why they're so pissy. Or anytime you do something they don't like they let you know about it and it's up to the player to remember whose toes they've stepped on (which honestly isn't very hard).

I also hope that much of what was described about diplomacy is the result of an early build. But given the designers' emphasis on "mystery" in diplomacy, I am afraid that it will not turn out to be so.

If doing positive things for the AI does not have any detectable, measurable payoff, then the logical response will be to never do positive things for the AI. Yet another set of options, tradeoffs, carefully considered choices will be gone from the game. All AIs will be treated the same way, in all situations, because there will be no reason not to do so.

Games with one true approach for all situations are not good strategy games. I really hope Civ V does not end up like this.

Yeah, that sounds worrisome to me too. If I wanted diplomacy to be meaningless because the AI will do whatever it wants anyway, I'd just play multiplayer.

Hopefully the final game will tell you what your city just built when it builds something [that would also be a pretty big problem], but fixing the diplomacy is probably much more difficult. =/

Thanks, The_J, for your report!

(Note for non-Germans: This guy has braved the Gießener Ring for bringing this report to you, he deserves a serious pat on the back. As anyone who knows this area can tell you, the highways there are the work of raving lunatic. They are probably meant to spell out a secret sign to passing UFOs, their layout certainly doesn't make any sense when driving on them.)

Back on topic.

I was concerned about the "mystery diplomacy" earlier, and your report seems to confirm my skepticism about this feature. In every strategy game I played, I always appreciated transparency. I think Master of Magic was the first game that gave the player an exact rundown on the game's economics, e.g. you could always see the effect of every single building on the gold or food balance of a city. That was great, it really helped getting into the game, testing and evaluating new strategies, etc.. When Civ4 transferred this transparency to diplomacy, I liked that a lot.

I'm not entirely sure how the "mystery diplomacy" fits into Sid Meier's design philosophy. It's almost a mantra for Meier that players want to feel in control, that's why there are no strong random events or randomized tech trees in Civ (according to a talk he gave some months ago). To me, removing the diplo modifier display seems like giving someone a gun and switching the lights out. Sure, he has control over something quite powerful, but he can barely exert it in a meaningful way. There's no good way to evaluate his actions and learn from the results.

However, before we go all skeptical on the feature, we should probably be aware that for those that miss the direct feedback (in the form of displayed changing modifiers), the first games will feel worse than later games. It won't take long until the community has divined findings like "Mansa Musa is a tech broker" or "Monty will even attack you when he's weaker than you". After a while, we will know better how to deal with mystery diplomacy. It's still disappointing that we have to resort to this kind of community research for something that could have been part of the game, but we'll probably find a way to regain this feeling of control even without displayed modifiers (some of us may even learn to appreciate the feature - based on my experiences with previous games I don't think I will, but hey, don't knock it till you try it).

It would be interesting to hear how troop movement, positioning, and attacking/defending felt (with regard to the 1UPT rule). Also, it would be great to hear a bit about the AI, but I guess that a March build of the game won't yield meaningful results about AI quality anyway ...

I think it's great that the behavior of the AI is gonna be more unpredictable and closer to the variety you might see in a game with human opponents. Hopefully things like the research pacts serve as a kind of realpolitik basis for continuing peaceful relationships, rather than just "you were nice to me, so I'll be nice to you," which maybe makes sense from a historical simulator perspective but doesn't for gameplay with AI that is trying to win at any cost.

But it's more and more clear that they're shifting diplomacy away from being primarily between major powers and instead being from a major power to a city state; with a city-state you have perfect information about how it feels about you and they behave the same whether it's multiplayer or single.

EDIT:

haphazard1 said:

If doing positive things for the AI does not have any detectable, measurable payoff, then the logical response will be to never do positive things for the AI. Yet another set of options, tradeoffs, carefully considered choices will be gone from the game. All AIs will be treated the same way, in all situations, because there will be no reason not to do so.

Click to expand...

well, not exactly; I at least like the idea of things like research pacts that give you a benefit for being peaceful with another civ. And obviously city states are stepping in to be the main entities you want to be nice too. It's definitely a huge change, but you can see where they're coming from.

This whole thing with diplomacy worries me. Ive been trying to give the no modifiers a chance, hoping they could pull it off. If it isnt obvious, or atleast semi, how do they expect new players and veterans alike to know what they are in for? Trial and error?

From what you first say about the notifications system it sounds like its adding a lot of clicking/more work. I dont get why they cant just have it like in IV, you could choose to do it this way, or the "normal" way. The overall picture from your write up seems to me that they have done many new things, made a pretty good game, but have left out and forgotten all the little things, things you dont notice when they are there, but miss them greatly when they are gone.

Tylerryan79 said:

This whole thing with diplomacy worries me. Ive been trying to give the no modifiers a chance, hoping they could pull it off. If it isnt obvious, or atleast semi, how do they expect new players and veterans alike to know what they are in for? Trial and error?

From what you first say about the notifications system it sounds like its adding a lot of clicking/more work. I dont get why they cant just have it like in IV, you could choose to do it this way, or the "normal" way. The overall picture from your write up seems to me that they have done many new things, made a pretty good game, but have left out and forgotten all the little things, things you dont notice when they are there, but miss them greatly when they are gone.

Click to expand...

I'm hoping revealing the modifiers is a simple tweak away from being an option in the settings menu.

ZimbuTheMonkey said:

I'm hoping revealing the modifiers is a simple tweak away from being an option in the settings menu.

Click to expand...

Amen. Especially for our first few games it'd be nice to see (via modifiers) just how AI reacts to our actions. I'd probably turn it off after I get a taste of the game.

Or as someone else mentioned, it'd be even nicer if there were advisors who gave us a general idea of what we're doing right or wrong. This way, there's some randomness (which I like as a concept) but we can't manipulate the AI via the modifiers. Plus, since AI attributes (is that the right word?) change game-to-game, we get even a little more randomness, so we can't predict 100% via such advisors.

Giant Dwarf said:

Or as someone else mentioned, it'd be even nicer if there were advisors who gave us a general idea of what we're doing right or wrong. This way, there's some randomness (which I like as a concept) but we can't manipulate the AI via the modifiers. Plus, since AI attributes (is that the right word?) change game-to-game, we get even a little more randomness, so we can't predict 100% via such advisors.

Click to expand...

This was always how I assumed the Foreign Advisor would work. If you pushed an AI around enough that they're considering war, they'll tell you; if you're on good enough terms that you should start thinking about permanent alliances, they'll tell you. This way, you're still informed as to how you stand with relation to the AI without the need for the ever-powergamey +/- modifiers.

Tylerryan79 said:

This whole thing with diplomacy worries me. Ive been trying to give the no modifiers a chance, hoping they could pull it off. If it isnt obvious, or atleast semi, how do they expect new players and veterans alike to know what they are in for? Trial and error?

Click to expand...

Common sense is a good place to start.

ok, here's a thought. Did J try to give away everything pretty much at once? I'm pretty sure you could do that in IV and also not get a huge + to the relationship beyond the normal modifier. I think, though I can't confirm, that they might not give a crap at all sometimes when you give them unsolicited gifts (I think I remember trying to give stuff away and not being able to get more than a +1 or 2 no matter what I threw at them, and not having the modifier change at all if I'd already given them gold a turn ago and tried again). So maybe it's just that diplomacy has more to do with how you treat them over the course of the game and not what you can do in one turn or the past 10 turns. Kinda like how brushing for an extra-extra long time doesn't fool the dentist if you haven't been taking care of your teeth for years.

Klasse Arbeit, Leute, Danke!

I had wondered why I couldn't understand what is going on from the videos of the interface, now I know why. And as somebody with a tendency to ignore diplomacy unless he concentrates, I can't say Mystery Diplomacy (I guess that is the official term now) sounds more fun.

BTW, this review was one of the most useful I've read and shows why I don't buy game magazines anymore. They only gush, and these guys here know what they are talking about. Thanks again.

Thanks for all your efforts.

Sorry that the game sounds a little unpolished in some areas.

At least we finally got a decent preview that doesn't use the word "organic" about 50 times or talks about the same damn thing as all the other previews. (Ooh look hexes!) Also one that doesn't lick Firaxis' boots like so many of the other game companies seem to do was much appreciated.