RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

[anti_strunt]

I also think we could nerf great scientists, but also cut out a lof things from the tech tree, which seem like filler techs just to make the game last longer.

This is interesting. Where do you think the tech tree could be culled (as opposed to just rearranged)? Civ 5 already has less techs than any Civ 2-4 (yes, I counted) with around 70, as compared to 85-90 for Civ 4, depending on version (Civ 2/3 also had 80-90, not sure about 1).

 

[Jaffa Tamarin]

I think the issues have been well explained in this thread, but my two cents is this: Civ has always been a more interesting empire building game than a war game. In Civ5, over and over decisions have been made to make the empire building aspect less interesting to try and make the war game more interesting. Its almost as if the designers looked at Civ4 and decided "Hmm, they did a pretty good job of everything but war, so if we want to improve the game we have to improve war," and then proceeded to throw away everything that makes Civ interesting in the name of improving tactical war.

As I see it, empire building is the early part of the game. This was the part of Civ3/Civ4 that I enjoyed, exploring the land, establishing my cities, maybe some early skirmishes. And then you got to the later part of the game, where I already had my empire, and it became a game of empire management (which was, frankly, tedious), and large-scale warfare, which was meh. In Civ5 the early game feels similar, but in the late-game the empire management is less tedious, and the warfare is less meh. For Civ3/Civ4 playing in succession games was the only way I found to make the later part of the game bearable, and I rarely finished a solo game. I've already finished more solo games of Civ5 than I ever did of earlier versions of Civ.

And I can't believe that somewhere in this thread there were people complaining about how they missed road spam. You have to be really determined to hate a game to think that road spam is better than a proper road network of roads going from A to B because there's a reason for it.

 

[Dantski]

oh noes its corbeau the annoying mod maker

 

[rb8954]

And I can't believe that somewhere in this thread there were people complaining about how they missed road spam. You have to be really determined to hate a game to think that road spam is better than a proper road network of roads going from A to B because there's a reason for it.

Perhaps you think they should do something to make spamming tile improvements a bad thing to do also? Make them similar to roads? Perhaps each improvement reduces overall output of that cities science, gold output, etc in a cumulative fashion. (So building too many of them is a bad idea) It would be proper tile improvements, so does this mean you are really determined to hate a game to think improvement tile spam is better?

 

[Jaffa Tamarin]

Perhaps you think they should do something to make spamming tile improvements a bad thing to do also? Make them similar to roads? Perhaps each improvement reduces overall output of that cities science, gold output, etc in a cumulative fashion. (So building too many of them is a bad idea) It would be proper tile improvements, so does this mean you are really determined to hate a game to think improvement tile spam is better?

Tile improvement spam is in both games. In Civ4 roads were just another tile improvement to be spammed. Civ5 does roads better.

 

[chaunceymo]

I know a lot of people will suggest balance tweaks to fix this. But I don't think this can be solved adequately without somehow addressing the issue of 1UPT at civ scale. You can't give an incentive to make large, developed cities better because that will just make that late game even faster and more unit-clogged than it is now. You can't make small, undeveloped cities weaker because than the early game will just be excruciatingly slow and boring.

There is one reasonably elegant solution to the above problem that has probably been suggested elsewhere, as it's been in plenty of previous 4X games: split civilian and military queues.

If you don't have to worry about the impact of building costs when figuring out military costs, you can keep military units very expensive (keeping the battlefield from getting too cluttered), but will be able to make buildings affordable. Give the AI benefits to civilian building at high levels (giving them better cities) but no benefit to military building.

I know Civ5 abhors sliders, and this scheme would require both a civ-wide military/civilian production slider and city sliders that let you override the civ-wide one, but it feels like it would correct a major problem in the game if done well.

 

[atteSmythe]

lurker's comment: Thanks for a great thread, guys. It was really helpful for me, and a pleasure to read as well. I appreciate the turn-by-turn commentary, and looked forward to reading the new posts each day. Thanks!

 

[chaunceymo]

It's the first time that I felt like Firaxis was genuinely attempting to surpass Alpha Centauri, even if Civ 5 itself fails to do so.

Sorry to go off-topic, but I really have to ask: is this a joke? SMAC was in large part so great because of the atmosphere and incredible production values (for a game of that time). Civ5 has easily the weakest atmosphere/production values of any Civ game to date.

Back on topic: I forgot to say in my previous post, but thanks for the game! Interesting to see game-breaking tactics executed at such a high level, and depressing that deity can be beaten so handily just by efficiently playing within the bounds of the game, rather than exploiting a single major problem (like the infamous perpetual anarchy praetorian steamroll in early Civ 4).

 

[Bezhukov]

Pi-r8 I gave a hard thought on your post game analysis and run some napkin math again and I came to quite an interesting conclusion.

As you said 1UPT is the main factor for the lack of balance and the disconnect between the various aspects of the game.

So I thought this idea and I hope you can help with some criticism/feedback.

Most times of this game we saw you mainly Opt for Horse ranged(catapults-->artilery) and some melee units as cannon fodder.

So It struck me.Keep the 1UPT but with a TWIST! If the rule is changed to : "Only one unit OF EACH TYPE can occupy the same tile" you can actually clean up alot of the issues the game design has.

A quick example :

having a spear a horse and a catapult at the same time.When they are attacked the rules will be the same as in CiV 4 as in the unit with the highest chance of dealing the highest damage while having the highest chance of not dieing will fight the attacker.

So immagine a few "divisions" if you will instead a vast blob of pointy sticks.It will clear ALOT of hexes esp for the AI.It will force the AI to use combined arms since it will be the most optimal way and it will effectivly stop any kind of 1-unittype-of-doom rushes/builds we see currently.

Also it will free ALOT of development room to make more drastic balance changes whithout braking the overal state of the game.(read free room for fixin ICS and all its aspects and generaly promote stuff like higher yields on special tiles larger citys etc.etc.etc.)

I think this is the conclusion after this game.

Nice one. This + six tiles min between cities + higher tile counts might just do the trick.

 

[Bezhukov]

As for all the frustration - it's understandable, but I think it's more a result of the fact that the PC is no longer the platform of choice for gaming. That means less resources however you slice it.

If we want a better game, and I think we all do whatever our reaction to what 5 is so far, we'll have to take the initiative ourselves to make it one. Of course many already are, but others seem content to play other games/vent. Not sure what that accomplishes given the opportunities that exist to make it better on our own.

 

[Bezhukov]

The interesting thing about the theory that the testers totally missed ICS is that several of the AI use it themselves!

My first few games where I went with a few megacities I noticed Bismarck spamming away and wondered how he managed his happiness - then he proceeded to pound me into the ground on emperor. My first hint that ICS might be the way to go.

One other advantage of ICS is that border growth (especially to hammer tiles) is just too slow for mid-sized cities, while with ICS you can get those tiles online much earlier.

 

[Donaithnen]

2) Embarked units should at least some some defense. Right now any old boat can kill a modern transport 100% of the time.

Very much this! It feels incredibly stupid to have to flag a destroyer as escort for my modern age military units while they cross large bodies of water, not because i'm afraid of the AI civs, but because i'm afraid a random barbarian _caravel_ is going to take it out when i'm not looking!

I'm not sure if it's a bug or not that such trips become necessary if i want to pick up the half-dozen or so ruins on small islands that the AI has been ignoring for the past few thousand years. They can send settlers across two continents to plant a city right in the middle of my territory, but can't bother to cross a minor channel to grab a free ruin?

 

[Corbeau]

oh noes its corbeau the annoying mod maker

Wow. I forgot that you played these games. Also forgot that I used to go by that title; my ego has grown much healthier since those days. Though what with teaching and thesis-writing, I haven't been doing much modding.

Sorry to go off-topic, but I really have to ask: is this a joke? SMAC was in large part so great because of the atmosphere and incredible production values (for a game of that time). Civ5 has easily the weakest atmosphere/production values of any Civ game to date.

No joke: while Civ's atmosphere and meaning will never surpass SMAC simply because Civ is restricted to "what was" and SMAC explores "what could be", Civ 5 is the first time that I've seen a Civ game engine attempt to use a more complex model of human development than SMAC did. Civ 5's culture system is the most significant leap that the series has made in gamic rhetoric since SMAC itself, and it would be a shame if that is overlooked because of unrelated design failures.

 

[Speaker]

I just don't understand how with such an established franchise with established strengths and weaknesses, the designers of Civ5 managed to completely forget what made this game last 20 years through 4-plus iterations to make some watered down version of Panzer General.

Perhaps it's because the designers of Civ5 and the lackeys they hired to test it never actually understood what made the previous incarnations of the game successful?

 

[Donaithnen]

Perhaps the modders could introduce a compromise--the ability to "merge" two (or more) units of the same type into a larger unit with hit points equal to the sum of the individuals. They could also be separated back out later. This would allow one to compact one's army into smaller units for fighting in close quarters. There would be some limit as to the number of units that could be merged. What would happen to the promotions would have to be worked out.

I really like this idea. The ability to easily combine and split groups of the same type of unit would simplify the battlefield while still allowing the kind of tactical flexibility 1upt is supposed to promote. I must admit that i like the idea of combine army stacks that go to a separate mode when combat is engaged (either a simple system like Call to Power or a new zoomed in map like Koei games) even better, however this idea has the advantage of being relatively simple to implement.

Just make late game costs on everything skyrocket, but make the power of late-game buildings also skyrocket. Isn't one of the biggest problems that late-game buildings are actually comparable in power to early game buildings, despite them costing far more? Make them actually strong, and you'd have reason to build them rather than just plunking down an extra city to build another copy of the basic building.

Oh, and nerf rush-buying into oblivion. And make better AI. And rework city states heavily (I wouldn't mind seeing the gold bribes gone completely from the city-state system, replaced by longer-term alliances for fulfilling city-state missions).

Perhaps rush-buying ought to be modified so it is actually a "rush" rather than an "instant" buy. It's been pointed out before that the idea of throwing money at a problem to get results is a relatively recent idea. It doesn't make sense that handful of gold will get you spearmen any faster. So at the start of the game rush buying should be impossible, or at best it should speed things up by some "small" factor. Then as you reach certain technologies the speed bonus you get would increase. The cost would either stay the same or go up as you reached each new tech, depending on how you wanted to balance things. Perhaps at first rush buying would get the unit completed in half the time, then a third the time, then a quarter the time, again depending on how you wanted to balance things.

Of course that would mean that if you needed to rush buy a unit to defend against an incoming attack you might be forced to go with a weaker unit in order to get it done in time, or that it would just be impossible. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or not

Of course given how this would end up being used by power players, perhaps there it would be simpler to have some system to "tax" production at weaker cities and concentrate the extra production at core cities, but that might be more programming work that modifying the current rush-buy system.

 

[pi-r8]

This is interesting. Where do you think the tech tree could be culled (as opposed to just rearranged)? Civ 5 already has less techs than any Civ 2-4 (yes, I counted) with around 70, as compared to 85-90 for Civ 4, depending on version (Civ 2/3 also had 80-90, not sure about 1).

Well like I said before, they have to make science come fast relative to production in order to avoid large armies that clog the map. Unfortunately, as we've seen, we still get those large armies in the later parts of the game. Culling some of the tech tree could help that by speeding up science- although it would lead to an extremely short game. Good for multiplayer I guess.

There's a lot of techs that only offer 1 thing, and you're forced to research them just to get the next tech. For example gunpowder, metallurgy, fertilizer, rifling, dynamite- all of them do only one thing, and I'm forced to research all of them mainly just to get artillery. I'd replace all those with just one or two techs that do more.

 

[Irgy]

I think doing 1 thing is the general pattern for techs if you discount wonders (which on deity at least are nigh on impossible to get anyway, early on at least).

I don't agree that unit production has to be slow directly relative to science. Given that you're encouraged to upgrade units, science moving on doesn't reset your unit count the way it used to anyway. They just need to be slow relative to the overall pace of the game. Now the science rate does determine that somewhat, but so does the time it takes to conquer another civilisation, the time it takes to grow, the turn limit, and many other things. Maybe making units more expensive relative to buildings would help, then there'd be motivation to build rather than unit pump.

Playing on Deity is skewing the issue a bit too. The AI spams troops like no-one should be able to, and humans need to abuse various things to compete, ending up with large armies as well by necessity. On lower difficulties maybe armies aren't so big - it's not that you couldn't build an even bigger army than on Deity, it's that if you're good enough to make an army that big you'll win the game before you get there. Deity is meant to be a degenerate limit, not the balancing point. But because the game is too easy, for a variety of other reasons, there's a lot more people playing on Deity now (such as myself).

 

[Khaim]

There is one reasonably elegant solution to the above problem that has probably been suggested elsewhere, as it's been in plenty of previous 4X games: split civilian and military queues.

If you don't have to worry about the impact of building costs when figuring out military costs, you can keep military units very expensive (keeping the battlefield from getting too cluttered), but will be able to make buildings affordable. Give the AI benefits to civilian building at high levels (giving them better cities) but no benefit to military building.

I know Civ5 abhors sliders, and this scheme would require both a civ-wide military/civilian production slider and city sliders that let you override the civ-wide one, but it feels like it would correct a major problem in the game if done well.

This sounds like a wonderful idea. I'm not sure why you think sliders are required. Just give the city's production to both queues, and increase costs to compensate. (In other words, lock it at 50/50.) One thing to note is that the civilian side can build wealth/research if nothing else is available or interesting. Should the military be able to build wealth/research as well? I'm inclined to say no, which means that there needs to be something else for it to do. It's actually much more likely that you'll be in a position where you don't want more units that one where you don't want more buildings. This suggests the following:

The military queue can "build" xp for its garrison unit.
AND/OR
The military queue can "build" an upgrade for its garrison unit.

The second option could actually replace the current gold upgrades. I think it makes a little more sense thematically, and is certainly more interesting tactically: you can't instantly upgrade your army during a war. This also prevents the "5 turn Infantry" issue you saw in this game, because upgrades now require hammers (and time) proportional to building a new unit instead of one turn and X gold.

Both options here also give meaning to garrisons; currently there is no reason to garrison your core cities and very minor reasons to garrison your borders (ignoring that rather bad Honor SP).

 

[Thomas G.]

One possible thing to limit ICS a little....
significantly increase cost of settlers whenever you attain a new age.

Would have some historical accuracy - seems to me that most current cities were founded a long time ago, and also that if one suddenly wanted to set up a new city today it would take a heck of a lot more basic infrastructure in place before anyone would consider moving there...so higher cost of settlers.

This would also be a slight curb to the technologically-leading (or slingshotting) empires as well. And provide some strategic thinking...this tech is really nice, but mabye I should expand a bit more first...

Would not be felt in the ancient age at all, and would limit rush-settling in medieval times and gradually ..(not force but)..encourage people to develop/conquer current cities rather than raze and carpet over with new ones.

 

[rb8954]

The only problem with many of the solutions, is that they often nerf more parts of the game to fix it. It inadvertently would be taking away the few gameplay options that there are, leaving gameplay with perhaps a more stable, but with a even more limited way to play the game.