PolyCast Episode 236: "Word of Mouth"

North, east, west and south. The two-hundred-and-thirty-sixth episode of PolyCast, "Word of Mouth", features regular co-hosts Daniel "DanQ" Quick, "Makahlua", Philip "TheMeInTeam" Bellew and "MadDjinn" with returning guest co-host Chris "TheChrisD". It carries a runtime of 59m59s.

The summary of topics is as follows:

- 01m13s | News
Civilization Beyond Earth: Rising Tide gets a release date and has revealed its third of four new factions to BE (02m34s); then, initial markets to have Civilization Online availability expands again (08m21s) and taking in a considerable leap in total units of Civilization titles shipped to date (09m48s).
- 12m59s | Open Mic
How CivBERT could positively influece perception of Beyond Earth within the Civ community and a possible hiccup within its revised diplomatic mechanics are front and centre in Episode 235 feedback received.
- 18m47s | Forum Talk
Reflecting on the "good" and the "bad" of Civilization V (recorded for Episode 230).
- 49m23s | Miscellaneous
What the past twelve months of top selling titles on Steam say about Civilization Beyond Earth and CivV endurance, and takeaways from survey ranking the high and low Civ series titles (52m41s).

- Intro/Outro | Miscellaneous
Instant defined.

Recording live before a listening audience every other Saturday, PolyCast is a bi-weekly audio production in an ongoing effort to give the Civ community an interactive voice on game strategy; listeners are encouraged to follow the show on Twitter, and check out the YouTube channel for caption capability. Sibling show RevCast focuses on Civilization: Revolution, ModCast on Civ modding, SCivCast on Civ social gaming and TurnCast on Civ multiplay.

Hearing Maddjin complain about lack of immersion (Defending the inclusion of #6 on the worst-of list) is weird. I'm so used to seeing him as an overly precise/through statistician. It's like a kid seeing the mall santa tear off his beard and go get drinks in the bar.

About the lists in general, I know he got a bit of flak here, but I'm really starting to like MegaBearsFan a lot more.

P.S. You should make a Top 10 top 10 Civilization lists list.

I hope you guys are right and the devs make it so it's impossible to be on great relations with everyone on the map.

Even better if the AI can figure out on its own to ally up against more powerful civs (even of that means turning on you).

This game is in serious need of some political intrigue and cloak and dagger type events that shake things up and change the nature of the game.

I want to feel under pressure on the map, the kind of pressure that makes me want to hide in my capital's city screen and kick back some scotch.

Talcove said:

Hearing MadDjinn complain about lack of immersion (Defending the inclusion of #6 on the worst-of list) is weird. I'm so used to seeing him as an overly precise/through statistician. It's like a kid seeing the mall santa tear off his beard and go get drinks in the bar.

About the lists in general, I know he got a bit of flak here, but I'm really starting to like MegaBearsFan a lot more.

Click to expand...

You can still like precision gameplay while feeling like the game shouldn't be a spreadsheet


We like MegaBearsFan as well, hence why we look at his stuff a lot. Disagreements happen, but ofc lists are quite Subjective and mostly based upon personal preferences and expectations.

The only time I ever do maths in Civ5 is deciding when to use the Musician concert tour

MadDjinn said:

You can still like precision gameplay while feeling like the game shouldn't be a spreadsheet


We like MegaBearsFan as well, hence why we look at his stuff a lot. Disagreements happen, but ofc lists are quite Subjective and mostly based upon personal preferences and expectations.

Click to expand...

Indeed, I mentioned at the top of both posts that these are subjective lists. I also want to point out that since this was a retrospective, it wasn't necessarily meant to reflect the state of the game now, but rather whether the concepts and mechanics were good at the point that they were introduced (particularly things like the Pact of Secrecy and Insta-Heal), with some consideration for how they shaped up in the long run.

A couple points:

#6 bad ideas: removing cinematics:
I want to emphasize that this point wasn't just about "oh, they took away all the pretty things". Wonder movies and such are superficial and don't impact the actual game much. If it was just that, then this wouldn't have made a top 10 list. What bugged me more was how uninformative the game's overall art style is. Firaxis wen to all the trouble to make these more realistic graphics, but the art feels so much more superficial than Civ IV's art. You could gather so much more about the state of a Civ IV game and its pieces by simply looking at the map. In Civ V, you have to dig into city screens and spreadsheets to find the info that Civ IV just showed you all the time. And that's assuming that Civ V even lets you see the info to begin with.

For example: In Civ IV, I could march my army up to a city and see every piece of infrastructure in and around that city. I knew what tiles were being worked, and I knew what buildings the city has. It's all right there in the map graphics. Even the tooltip showed the ratio of cultural ownership. I could make a much more informed decision about what tiles to pillage (you know, after pillaging the towns back to cottages) and whether capturing the city was even worth throwing my cannon-fodder units at, or if I should just pillage and march on by (and maybe force the enemy army out of his protective walls). In Civ V, I know the city's name, population, and whether it has a wall, wonders, or a coliseum. So my decision basically comes down to "Do I have the happiness to support the population? If not, then burn it to the ground because it's in my way!"

#1 bad idea: being a board game
You got me on this one. Very poor choice of language for the header. I probably should have said something more akin to "empire-management game" or "empire-builder". I didn't play the first two Civ games, played III briefly, and didn't really get into the series until Civ IV. So I don't have the connection to Civ's board game roots that some of the more established series fans do. Like Phil said, it was very easy to get lost in the immersive quality of IV. What I miss from Civ IV was the ability to role play as the leader of a civilization of people who all have (very abstracted) wants and needs. In Civ V (especially vanilla), I always felt like I was playing as a general just controlling a bunch of armies. BNW is better than vanilla by an order of magnitude, but still not quite up to IV's level.

Part of this could be my own growth as a player. Perhaps my firmer understanding of the Civ mechanics and my progression to harder difficulties makes it harder for me to put myself in that role-player mentality. Maybe if I went back to Civ IV and started playing it at Immortal or Diety level, it would also seem to "game-y". :/

I agree that I don't want Civ to become a "sim". I've tried playing EUIV, and it overwhelmes me every time I hit the "go" button. I really want to play it, but I there's just so much to learn, and I don't know if I have the time to really learn it. Total War is about as complex as I've been able to handle so far.

Snowballing is an interesting topic. Have too much and the winner is predetermined, have too little - especially when combined with rubberbanding-mechanics - and it feels like most of the game doesn't matter and instead the winner is determined by who manages to take the final turn the best. Beyond Earth is an interesting topic when it comes to that, because it took mechanics that were rubberband-mechanics in Civ 5 and made them into snowballing-mechanics (Espionage is the best example for that), or just completely removed them.

Interestingly enough I actually can't think of a single 4x that I feel has struck a fair balance between the two. Which is a bit irritating, because the Diplomacy-System itself seems to be perfect to create a dynamic rubberbanding-system that doesn't feel forced by the game, but instead comes from social interactions. If people stopped trading with those who get ahead... started trading more with each other, then they would already be able to gain ground. (Of course the trading would actually need stuff that really help with progress) And for the player it would feel like something that actual people would do... and not just a mechanic that is designed to keep everyone on equal footing.

"roleplay" "play as a leader who lives for thousands of years"

choose one

I think there should be random events, some of which are more likely to happen to more developed, richer players. For example economic crisis leads to unhappiness etc. Or overfishing/overfarming which leads to loss of resource tiles. Stuff like that.

I always saw the leaders as symbolic.

The embodiment and personifications of their respective nations, the sum of their ambitions and combined will, etc.

I refuse to see George Washington or Montezuma as immortal deities.

Ryika said:

Interestingly enough I actually can't think of a single 4x that I feel has struck a fair balance between the two. Which is a bit irritating, because the Diplomacy-System itself seems to be perfect to create a dynamic rubberbanding-system that doesn't feel forced by the game, but instead comes from social interactions. If people stopped trading with those who get ahead... started trading more with each other, then they would already be able to gain ground. (Of course the trading would actually need stuff that really help with progress) And for the player it would feel like something that actual people would do... and not just a mechanic that is designed to keep everyone on equal footing.

Click to expand...

The one that always bugs me is when Civ A has a large army and attacks Civ B who has a tiny army. Civ A always comes to ask me to help beat up on the weakling, when it should be Civ B coming to ask me for help defend against the bully.

Nailed it, shaglio.

Civs under attack or even at war never ask for help, and there's really no way for you to offer to ally up with them and fight alongside them.

They may even denounce you for declaring war and capturing a city of the civ they're currently fighting.

Ryika said:

Interestingly enough I actually can't think of a single 4x that I feel has struck a fair balance between the two. Which is a bit irritating, because the Diplomacy-System itself seems to be perfect to create a dynamic rubberbanding-system that doesn't feel forced by the game, but instead comes from social interactions. If people stopped trading with those who get ahead... started trading more with each other, then they would already be able to gain ground. (Of course the trading would actually need stuff that really help with progress) And for the player it would feel like something that actual people would do... and not just a mechanic that is designed to keep everyone on equal footing.

Click to expand...

The problem with this is that the powerful civs, by virtue of being powerful, also tend to have the strongest economy. And since trade route value is determined (at least in part) by relative economic strength of the cities that are trading, it frequently behooves a weaker civ to trade with a larger one. And then add research gain to that. These are good rubber band mechanics, since they grant more value to the weaker civ in the trade, but it still encourages EVERYONE to open trade with that one economically leading civ.

Perhaps going back to having a cap on the number of trade routes that can go in or out of a particular city could help distribute wealth around a little bit more? Maybe each city could start with a cap of 2 incoming trade routes. Buildings like Markets, Harbors, Airports, and Stock Exchanges (or a Customs House building) could increase the limit. Civ IV had a mechanic like that in which every city had a limit to the number of trade routes. So everyone couldn't funnel money into the same city. Of course, Civ IV also didn't give the player any control over where your trade routes went, and it didn't have city states to trade with, so ...

Ryika said:

Interestingly enough I actually can't think of a single 4x that I feel has struck a fair balance between the two. Which is a bit irritating, because the Diplomacy-System itself seems to be perfect to create a dynamic rubberbanding-system that doesn't feel forced by the game, but instead comes from social interactions. If people stopped trading with those who get ahead... started trading more with each other, then they would already be able to gain ground. (Of course the trading would actually need stuff that really help with progress) And for the player it would feel like something that actual people would do... and not just a mechanic that is designed to keep everyone on equal footing.

Click to expand...

Even in board games it's actually quite rare to see that behaviour. The only one that comes to my mind right away is The Settlers of Catan, where trading with other players is an essential way to quickly get the goods you need to build stuff and people close to victory are usually trade-embargo'ed.

The number one bad thing about Civ5 and the source of a lot of the game's design flaws - 1UPT. That was not a good change at all, it was a terrible change.

Being a board game isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all Civ was originally a board game. Being a bad board game and not acknowledging flaws is a bad thing.

MP is a mess too, way too much clickspamming nullifies any sort of tactics and whole classes of units are relegated to near-worthlessness.