Sadly, Grade "F" for Civ IV: Colonization

[arkham4269]

It depends on the number of ships the REF has, and how much he sends per turn. I just had some very very strange REF construction, and it's obvious that it's insanely random for artillery and ships. If the REF keeps his ships below 10, then you can pretty handily keep down his forces with a good dragoon 'wipe up' crew. But if he's sending more than that at once - you're hosed.

Trouble is, the number of ships the REF makes seems .. bizzare. I haven't figured out the rhyme or reason to the artillery and ship construction in the code. (In my last game, he had more ships than regulars!)

I'm waiting for when the modders put in the code (if possible) for desertion among the Regulars. Sort of like the 'crazed' promotion the Fall From Heaven mod has to represent a lot of Regulars during the Amer-Rev pretty much said, "Thanks for the trip here; I'll be going now" With the high German population of Pennsylvania, the English found that it was bad to march Hessian mercenaries through that area as they lost a lot of troops to desertion.

 

[Bad Brett]

I don't want a flame war, ... snip ... I think the problem may be that the Beta testers main job is to locate bugs and test things like game balance. The real issue here, and the majority of the members here seem to agree with me, is that the the punishment elements of the game removes much of the fun that the original game had.

Moderator Action: If you don't want to start a flame war, then don't start one.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Blackmantle]

@ Bad Brett: You are aware of the fact that not only does Dale listen to those complaints but is (even without beeing paid a single bug for it) right now fixing the underlying problems causing these complaints? (and has come a long way in doing so btw. Just look into creation & customization subforms right here.)

If i have not misread, he even accomplished to fix the presumably hardest problem to fix (codewise not measured by effect on the game / fun ). AI problems with inability do defend / use military and win its WoI.


Attitude problems given or taken but i can't belive someone whould be complaining about that. And for the rest im sure he has understood that by now. Sorts of...


And even though game-testers should test and help remove imbalances (and as such do share a small part of the responsibility), they are not the devs, and thus not making the decisions...
Even if the testers were! the root cause (and i doubt they were the major one, but thats utterly imo/impression.) of those problems the blame is still to be taken somewere else largely.

 

[Elogain]

Hi, I bought this game for 2 days ago and Ive played at EASIEST difficulty and yet I get mashed to . .. .. .. . by the REF.

I really enjoy the first part of the game but the revolution thing is a joke and I really hope that it gets patched or atleast is scaled to difficulty level you choose.

I actually went to the main page for this game to see if there was a patch.. when there wasnt one I checked the community page and this site was on the top there. So I went here and found this thread and actually registered just to say what I just said. Its not only the OP that feels this way but me too, and I might not be the best turn based gamer ever but I do have a love for these sort of games and I have been playing them since Civ1.. and tbh this is crazy

 

[pvt chaos]

Hi, I bought this game for 2 days ago and Ive played at EASIEST difficulty and yet I get mashed to . .. .. .. . by the REF.

Is the difficulty level perhaps broken ? I played numerous game on pilgrim and had difficult time's, yet on explorer level I was easily obtaining victory after victory.

Just my 2

 

[Padma]

Moderator Action: I really don't want to close this thread. There is much good discussion taking place. But I'm getting tired of reading everything from snide jabs to outright flaming of other posters. This forum is for CIVILIZED discussion!

You all have been warned.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[obsolete]

Dale, any chance in the future Firaxis will fix their broken system by using a common-sense method of simply ramping up the REF due to TIME? This is sort of how Civ IV has generaly worked, and every other game. You are in a time race for lib, or the space race, etc.

I think Firaxis tried to out-think themselves here getting too creative with an idea on paper, and ended up out-doing themselves.


"If it's not broke, don't fix it!"

I think, everyone new to this game buying it off the shelf was under the impression that conquering your continent was the way to go. You would THINK to get a force to rival your mother land, you would have to follow common sense and spread out like a mofu to grab land & power.

Yet, this is actually hurting you. Something is definitely flawed when I am having a MUCH easier time killing my King with only 1 city, than I do when I have 10! LOL.

There is also something crazy when good players kept getting pwned on begginer mode, but as soon as they found out the crazy mechanism under-the-hood of the game, everyone can then jump to deity level with ease and it's still a cake-walk.

I just got the game less than a week, and now the only thing that makes me interested is TRYING to get a challenge again.

One thing I'm trying to do to keep things interesting is FORCING myself to win by defending in cities and not using the cannon exploit. But, this is not something people should be FORCED to do

BTW, I know there was a call for beta testers on the forum. I'm curious how big this select was, and how much time they were given, because it seems that it must have been really an Alpha-stage testing, with the Beta only happening when it went public.

I've been a alpha/beta-tester for quite a few companies over the last decade, though never for Firaxis (Ironic as I played more hours on their games than any other). And I'm still surprised at how Firaxis got pwned here.

I remember back when Firaxis hired another company to do one of their Civ III expansions, THAT company actually had a total of 1200 testers for their project. Though only about 600 actually filled out reports.

 

[r_rolo1]

There is also something crazy when good players kept getting pwned on begginer mode, but as soon as they found out the crazy mechanism under-the-hood of the game, everyone can then jump to deity level with ease and it's still a cake-walk.

My experience too...... pwnd in first game, came to the forum, read about the bells-REF stuff, played again upping a few levels and won easily.

As it is ( unfortunately ) the game is clearly a l33t game : dawn hard and unintuitive for someone that by accident picks it as their first experience in Sid's world ( and even for some more seasoned players, probably even more for those ) and damn easy for someone that knows how things work behind the stage ( AKA exploits ).

 

[The_Dwarf]

I think, everyone new to this game buying it off the shelf was under the impression that conquering your continent was the way to go.

I find that a bit funny because for all people who have read the afterword from Soren Johnson in the Civ4 manual it should be 100% clear that they will never produce a game where a brute force ICS strategy is the only/most viable.

That said I was pretty suprised so many players got fooled and actually played against all the countermeasures and then blamed the game for being unfair.

 

[Dale]

Dale, any chance in the future Firaxis will fix their broken system by using a common-sense method of simply ramping up the REF due to TIME? This is sort of how Civ IV has generaly worked, and every other game. You are in a time race for lib, or the space race, etc.

I hope you can appreciate that I don't have the answer for that, and neither will anyone else. Since you've tested for other companies, you would be aware that testing finished quite a while ago, and since then we've been "out of the loop". I am sure that Firaxis is taking everything, and eliminating the pure whinging to get a fix list for a patch.

 

[r_rolo1]

This is not Civ IV and it was not made by Soren, that it is even working elsewhere.

Anyway in my opinion ( for all that is worth ), this passed from uber-ICS mode in Civ III and before to more-than-5-cities-is-evil in here ( or like a certain Civ III fan that sometimes rants in the Civ IV forums would say: "Mini Civ" )

 

[The_Dwarf]

This is not Civ IV and it was not made by Soren, that it is even working elsewhere.

That doesnt matter because a game isnt made by a single person. Yeah this isnt Civ4 but what do you think - that those guys changed their mentality over night and allow that a ICS strategy becomes the most valuable option. Seems pretty weird to me honestly.

 

[Gliese 581]

I don't think they intended a OCC to be just as easy as a regular game.

 

[r_rolo1]

ICS would be pretty bad indeed, I agree.... but even a a civ-IV alike maintenance stuff would cope with the worse manifestations of ICS. The mechanism they used here is not even slightly intuitive: talking Civ IV style, is like mixing GPP generation, culture, maintenance and diplo demerits in the same variable and then encourage people to get GP

 

[Wodan]

Dale, one thing you might want to consider for your patch is increasing the default # of civs for each map size, adjusted by sealevel settings etc. If the map was more crowded then there would be less of an incentive to expand and fill up all that space. Basically the land is there for the taking, so it's like it's begging the player to go do it. This phenomenon is made worse by the fact that cities are a 1 tile radius instead of the 2 tile radius of CIV.

Does that make sense?

 

[player1 fanatic]

The biggest issue here is, that due to REF being tied just to liberty bell generation, having bigger colonies means having bigger REF, while having smaller colonies means smaller REF.

And since waste gets higher and higher when having many colonies (less educated citizens due to inflation, more transports needed, more tax increases), small empire is always better in the endgame, due to being more efficient (more gold per pop earned) and having lower REF to face.

In short, game punishes expansion, which was supposed to be reward in game named Colonization.

 

[obsolete]

When I first read the rating of ‘F’ for this game, I thought it was being a little too harsh (though not too far off).

However, now that I’ve taken a few days to examine it hands-on for myself, I believe the ‘F’ rating is exactly right-on-the-money.

Lets for a moment, ignore all the broken features and all the bugs and the rest of that. Lets look at something very simple, that doesn’t require any coding or mathematics, or guesswork. Lets look at the colopedia (whoops, civopedia now??).

Now, it is no surprise that every grammarian is horrified at the way the English language is so butchered in it. Every linguistics major is thinking the writers should be shot for such atrocities. However, let’s ignore all the bad grammar and typos and whatnot.

Lets look at the specific game-information. This is what should be the primary concern to all players who ever use it.

Now tell me, why is there so much information that is just plain WRONG?

Ok, how about we ignore all the wrong things, and look at the rest of it. So many things can be misleading. Obviously anyone reading it will assume that artillery, Man-o-wars can be made by the players after just putting the prerequisites as listed. The list goes on and on.

But hell, lets ignore that. Lets say I simply wanted simple information, like ummm land fighting units. Now there are only TWO; regulars and dragoons. So how hard can this be?

Yet, if I search up info on the REF regulars to see how strong they are, I get a strength of “0” listed? This is not the only unit where nonsense is given. Well what about the other type of unit, what can the colopedia (ooops, civopedia now) tell us about those?

That is a good question! They are not even listed in the units list at all that I can see?

I can go on and on with horror stories of the manual, but I will stop here.

When I used to beta (for more than one company) in the last 10 years, we never used to even touch the manuals. This is because either the company had professional writers putting it to print themselves (and we were never even got a chance to see it until the original package was shipped). Or it was still pretty much kept in another dept. until the CD would go gold. Then we’d be able to read the PDF for the first time.

However, in this game, the manual is integrated with the game. Which leads me to question how did the whole beta group and everyone else on the project miss all this too?

For shame..

 

[de Tocqueville]

lol

metacritic.com rating 85. EIGHTYFIVE! The lowest being 70. Something's terribly going wrong here...

I mean... Even the cover-artwork sucks and the graphics are rather outdated by todays standards... I wonder - who writes those 'professional' reviews?

It's some collective ... thing. So every 'professional reviewer' sees all these favorable tests and is afraid to be called incompetent by his colleagues and competitors. This is insane!

 

[TFVanguard]

It's some collective ... thing. So every 'professional reviewer' sees all these favorable tests and is afraid to be called incompetent by his colleagues and competitors. This is insane!

It's called 'gaming the review', and it's something that game companies do all the time. If you'll notice, most of the most critical issues with Civ4Col don't show up until later in the game... which is likely well and beyond the point ANY of the 'professional' reviewers actually played it.

 

[arkham4269]

Lets for a moment, ignore all the broken features and all the bugs and the rest of that. Lets look at something very simple, that doesn’t require any coding or mathematics, or guesswork. Lets look at the colopedia (whoops, civopedia now??).

Now, it is no surprise that every grammarian is horrified at the way the English language is so butchered in it. Every linguistics major is thinking the writers should be shot for such atrocities. However, let’s ignore all the bad grammar and typos and whatnot.

You know, as one of those English Majors, I have to agree. I spent 17.5 years in the military as an intelligence analyst and I can tell you, it doesn't matter your audience, the nature of the information or what, but you could be briefing about the impending invasion from Mongo and if your PowerPoint slide has a typo, almost everyone in the rooms stops listening and starts muttering to each other about the "lame misspelling on bullet point 4." I've seen it time and time again.

I kept training my troops that while we might be in a combat zone, we had to produce as professional a piece as we could because if the 'packaging' wasn't right, the message would be lost. I had Colonel's tell me I gave better briefs than people at the Pentagon and I believe it was simplybecause I knew that a briefing had to A) meet the intel needs of the staff, B) Be easy to read, understand and be 'cheesy' when necessary and most importantly C) had to be accurate and professional as much as the time tactical situation allowed.

I've seen major briefs go down in flames simply because the officer didn't bother to do a spell check or even practice his brief before hand. From what you've said, it seems that no one proof-read the manual or even bothered to spell-check it.

I'm sorry but this p*sses me off something fierce because it's like they are hoping we won't notice the cr*ppy product they've sold us after they have our money. It's like Star Trek writers who wimp out and suddenly break their own internal rules because they can't think of a way out of the scene they've written. People say "It's only a Movie/Show/Book/Game!" to which I say I'm paying for it with time and money and I want my money's worth.

So far, Civ IV: Colonization seems to be failing the grade.

P.S. In previewing this post, I found 4 errors, two of which made it sound like I was saying the opposite of what I meant to say. Just goes to show how important proof-reading is.