Firaxis at Pax East 2014 - Speculations?

[GoodSarmatian]

Why would an Alpha Centauri game be horrific? I'd love it!

Civ 5 is 3D in look only. SMAC has a true 3D planet with different elevations which influence rainfall and fertility while Civ 5 has just tacked on hills and mountains on a flat map. You can't really do Alpha Centauri justice with the Civ 5 engine.

My money is on Civilization 6. Civ 5 was released in 2010 and the series gets a new installment every four to five years. A 2014 announcement and 2015 release would fit neatly into the pattern.

 

[Drakarska]

I won’t let myself even hope for SMAC, it’s about the only title I would happily pay full price for, early and often. I too would like Drakarska to explain his post!

Civ 5 is 3D in look only. SMAC has a true 3D planet with different elevations which influence rainfall and fertility while Civ 5 has just tacked on hills and mountains on a flat map. You can't really do Alpha Centauri justice with the Civ 5 engine.

My money is on Civilization 6. Civ 5 was released in 2010 and the series gets a new installment every four to five years. A 2014 announcement and 2015 release would fit neatly into the pattern.

Ninja'd and answered

 

[beetle]

I think the Jump from Civ4 level graphics to Civ5 was quite huge largely because Firaxis/Infogrames was able to get away with a repurposed SMAC engine for Civ3 in 2001 when other devs already had a full 3D engine (think Empire Earth released the same year) so Civ4 in 2005 already looked kind of dated even though it was a huge jump from Civ3 and their first fully 3D Civ game.

I am not following your explanation. Are you saying that Civ4 pretty much uses the same engine as Civ3? Or that Civ4 was entirely different engine, but had the relatively low bar of just trying to look like Civ3?

Also, if Civ3 used the SMAC engine, why did they do away with terrain height (and the ability for that height to change during a game)? Or I am forgetting that Civ3 had global warming and rising sea levels? Your post is the first I have heard about Civ3 using the SMAC engine, and I would like to read more about that. Do you have any suggestions for finding web stories about that?

 

[dexters]

I am not following your explanation. Are you saying that Civ4 pretty much uses the same engine as Civ3? Or that Civ4 was entirely different engine, but had the relatively low bar of just trying to look like Civ3?

Also, if Civ3 used the SMAC engine, why did they do away with terrain height (and the ability for that height to change during a game)? Or I am forgetting that Civ3 had global warming and rising sea levels? Your post is the first I have heard about Civ3 using the SMAC engine, and I would like to read more about that. Do you have any suggestions for finding web stories about that?

No Civ3 used an improved SMAC engine. They were released only 2 years apart.

Civ4, as a necessary jump into 3D used an off the shelf gamebryo engine and they weren't particularly adventurous with it. I didn't ever recall the game getting high praise for its looks even at release.

Civ5 was really the first game where they went with a cinematic look. The game ironically looks a lot like the pre-rendered city-view in Civ3 but in 3D. My point is that having established a reasonable look that was arguably first set in 2001 in Civ3 (albeit in pre-rendered form) they can just improve on it and work on performance and mechanics, which is the bread and butter of the franchise anyways

With Civ4, there was obvious room to improve visually. I think less so for Civ5.

Civ3 City view (canned pre-rendered art assets where buildings are added/subtracted based on what you've built)

 

[beetle]

Ninja'd and answered

Okay, I can agree with you that a bad SMAC release would be worse than none at all, but I really like hexes better than squares. I don’t see why hexes would me incompatible with weather effects and real terrain height.

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah, bringing in the terrain heights, terraforming, and SMAC advanced tech tree/unit system with the 1upt/hex civ 5 game engine would be fantastic. But due to rights, we won't see that. sigh.

 

[dexters]

Yeah, bringing in the terrain heights, terraforming, and SMAC advanced tech tree/unit system with the 1upt/hex civ 5 game engine would be fantastic. But due to rights, we won't see that. sigh.

Seems like a logical place for them to go, especially with 1UPT adding depth to combat. The obvious next step is to bring terrain height into account for A/D calculations.

 

[otaman1]

Weather also plays a big role in the geographic world. Tornadoes usually form in plains, volcanoes are usually found in mountain ranges or on islands, and desert wind storms are form from the mountains located south. But I think it's doubtful that they'll implement these.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

Civ has always been about tiles, it never used a proper elevation technique. Everything is nothing more than a tile.

 

[Art Grin]

My money is on Civilization 6. Civ 5 was released in 2010 and the series gets a new installment every four to five years. A 2014 announcement and 2015 release would fit neatly into the pattern.

That makes quite a lot of sense.
I've already forgotten that Civ5 is almost four years old by now. A 2015 release also fits with the timeline of the last expansion for the previous game being released two years before the next game.

 

[janboruta]

An announcement of Civ 6 seems really unlikely this year. Civ 5 is a very, VERY profitable business for Firaxis and nullifying it by announcing a new installment doesn't make much sense. The dust after the release of BNW hasn't really settled yet...

Besides, April 2016 will be the time of 25th anniversary of the release of Civilization 1. This is a much more compelling date for Civ 6 to be released than any other else. Therefore I am inclined to believe that Civ 6 will be announced at Pax (or other gaming convention) in 2015, with 2014 being used to promote Civ community and mods - this action has been started in the last few weeks on a larger scale than before.

 

[Cyon]

About copyright issues, can't they just release 'Side Miers Proxima centaury' instead, I would love to play that especially with hexes, 1up but also terraform elevations and a 3d globe (make it a fuller sphere with 12 Pentagon's and any number of hexagons) this could be a great way to test such mechanics for a civ 6 game.

Skickat från min GT-I9195 via Tapatalk

 

[s8g]

How about a "Civilization Classic", a reimplementation of Civ 1 or 2 in the engine of Civ5, just like Firaxis made a reimplementation of Colonization für Civ4?

 

[dexters]

An announcement of Civ 6 seems really unlikely this year. Civ 5 is a very, VERY profitable business for Firaxis and nullifying it by announcing a new installment doesn't make much sense. The dust after the release of BNW hasn't really settled yet...

Besides, April 2016 will be the time of 25th anniversary of the release of Civilization 1. This is a much more compelling date for Civ 6 to be released than any other else. Therefore I am inclined to believe that Civ 6 will be announced at Pax (or other gaming convention) in 2015, with 2014 being used to promote Civ community and mods - this action has been started in the last few weeks on a larger scale than before.

Yeah, I was thinking 2016 would be logical as well for them, though not realizing it would be 25th anniversary.

Also PAX while a huge gamer centric event, it not the largest event where they could announce Civ6. That would be E3 where there is more mainstream media attention, where as PAX is more enthusiast centric.

I think X-Com XP or something unrelated to Civ might be more likely.

 

[MantaRevan]

April 12 is my birthday. Whatever Firaxis announces, it will be a nice birthday surprise!

 

[HeraldtheGreat]

They'll be announcing Civ VI, to tell us to wait 'till 2017.

 

[beetle]

No Civ3 used an improved SMAC engine. They were released only 2 years apart.

I don’t remember the two games really feeling the same, except them both using parallelograms, but I suppose you could be right. I understand that player action raising/lowering terrain would not have fit III, so they disabled that. But if III used the SMAC engine, why did they not at least use the weather modeling? (That is, the near west side of a mountain range was wet, the near east side arid.)

Civ3 City view (canned pre-rendered art assets where buildings are added/subtracted based on what you've built)
http://www.civ3.com/images/screenshots/cityview1.jpg

Thanks for that lovely reminder. That part blew me away until several games in when I started to notice repetition of underlying background landscape settings, and that it was not always consistent with the city placement. I agree that V is just starting to approach this.

There was not a feature like this in SMAC, but that doesn’t really contradict your assertion that III used the SMAC engine, sine the city view was not strongly tied to the world view.

 

[Sequitor]

How about a scaled down version of Civ 5 for the Android/IOS tablet market.

 

[brewgod]

I would love to see the city screen improved with much better details like the above photo from Civ 3. I miss the cool graphics and buildings that you have built. From the technology basis game programmers should be able to WOW us as die hard fans.

Oh yeah...how time flies....I remember playing Civ 1 from two floppy discs back in college in 1993. 25th Anniversary coming soon. Even Civ 5 been out for four years now. Wow...I remember buying it at Fry's like it was yesterday.

Brew God

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

How about a scaled down version of Civ 5 for the Android/IOS tablet market.

That is another thing that I suspect could happen.