Civ4 vs Civ5

[Doctor Phibes]

Hmmm, but C3C sure isn't that perfectly "finished" version. If there ever has been a really unfinished version of a Civ game, then it must be C3C. Hasn't even been designed and developed by Firaxis but by a third party group (Breakaway games), has several silly imbalances added (see Sulllas artilce: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ3/conquestsed.html) - and has still several bugs never fixed properly or actually brought back after have been patched out of earlier versions (submarine bug, culturally linked starting positions bug, princess bug, G-B-shoot-everywhere bug/exploit, etc.). I think it's quite obvious here, that this last expansion suffered from the focus of Firaxis on the Civ IV evelopment that had allready begun and there was no real interest to finish it properly. So I prefer Civ 3 Vanilla/PtW over C3C...

Ouch. Thanks for the link, a fine read from Sulla as usual. Point taken - I only got as far as PtW, then went to Civ4, so wasn't aware of these huge problems. But avoidable - at least Complete lets you play any version you want.

 

[gps]

Ouch. Thanks for the link, a fine read from Sulla as usual.

You're welcome.

But avoidable - at least Complete lets you play any version you want.

Not always, sadly there are version of C3C available that actually omit the exe-files required to play Vanilla and PtW!

 

[plastiqe]

I found the Soren interview in the Ex-Firaxians branching out: Oxide Games and Mohawk Games news post we have here.

Trip, an excellent player and tester...

Disagree with Sulla there. Trip = Jon Shafer.

 

[gps]

^ Nice discussion you got going over there. It's interesting to see the lead designer of Civ V on the one hand dismissing the traits system as unbalanced and advocating lesser Civilizations - and then have a look at what he designed in V... Well, yeah. All I can say: I am quite fond of the traits system in Civ III and Civ IV, especially compared to individuality monsters like Venice and all the problems and imbalances they cause in V...

 

[Doctor Phibes]

^ Nice discussion you got going over there. It's interesting to see the lead designer of Civ V on the one hand dismissing the traits system as unbalanced and advocating lesser Civilizations - and then have a look at what he designed in V... Well, yeah. All I can say: I am quite fond of the traits system in Civ III and Civ IV, especially compared to individuality monsters like Venice and all the problems and imbalances they cause in V...

At one point he seems to lean towards making the next Civ RTS - because it would appeal to more people (or so he thinks). I now wonder if this was a discarded element in the make-up of Civ5 that should have been kept. Because, given the tedium of Civ5 lategame play, I think it would actually benefit from an EUIII-type semi-RTS approach, which is that the game just cycles through moves until either the player hits pause or certain important classes of event occur. This would avoid having to click 'Next Turn' a couple of hundred times to get to the end of the game, at least, though there would still be the terrible 'diplomatic' messages to put up with. Be nice to be able to pop off and have lunch while the game plays itself without having to tape the Enter key down.

But I do not think this would be a good direction for Civ in general to go in.

 

[duckstab]

^ Nice discussion you got going over there. It's interesting to see the lead designer of Civ V on the one hand dismissing the traits system as unbalanced and advocating lesser Civilizations - and then have a look at what he designed in V... Well, yeah. All I can say: I am quite fond of the traits system in Civ III and Civ IV, especially compared to individuality monsters like Venice and all the problems and imbalances they cause in V...

I agree, traits are easier to balance. There aren't that many of them, and everyone gets two. If I'm FIN, there's a very good chance I'm not the only one with that particular set of advantages.

Unique powers can work well in mods that are, for example, based off RFC, because the designer can balance an otherwise overpowered UP against other factors: a weak starting location, hostile neighbors, or scripted events. And vice-versa, of course. But in the absence of those factors, you're almost certainly going to have balance issues in some games at least.

I also rather like the approach taken with C2C and some other mods, where you either pick your traits along the way or you earn them based on your in-game activities. I'd be OK with UPs that worked similarly.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

I also rather like the approach taken with C2C and some other mods, where you either pick your traits along the way or you earn them based on your in-game activities. I'd be OK with UPs that worked similarly.

Yes, I think this is an especially good idea when it comes to UUs and UBs. The mechanic isn't exactly obvious, though. You'd have to start with some ability to create a new unit design - otherwise no ancient uniqueness, so I don't think you could just rely on UU/UB points like GP points - but if you did hold off, you should benefit from a more powerful UU/UB. Maybe this would also need a Civ equivalent of the Design Workshop in SMAC, which also solves the graphic depiction. Actually, maybe SMAC's prototyping system would work with this.

WRT to traits, perhaps these could simply be broken down to sub-elements you get points to spend on at the start, not unlike choosing Strength, Intelligence etc attributes in an RPG. For example, you get to choose at the start up to three selected buildings you can build at half cost, or you could spend those points to get extra gold yield from tiles or whatever. The AI would have to be restricted to making choices here that were not too wacky of course, but it would be easy enough to make sure that no two civs were exactly the same.

Just handwaving...

Anyway, I think that most people like the idea of unique civs, but I do think you could design a decent game without them (or at least have all civs start out the same and develop uniqueness). Unmodded CTP2 did just this and, although it had many flaws, I don't think this was one of them.

 

[Lennier]

WRT to traits, perhaps these could simply be broken down to sub-elements you get points to spend on at the start, not unlike choosing Strength, Intelligence etc attributes in an RPG. For example, you get to choose at the start up to three selected buildings you can build at half cost, or you could spend those points to get extra gold yield from tiles or whatever. The AI would have to be restricted to making choices here that were not too wacky of course, but it would be easy enough to make sure that no two civs were exactly the same.

MOO II had a race customization screen that worked like this--you could even take a number of "negative" traits to give you more points to spend on the positive traits you really wanted.