The Final Analysis?

[SuperJay]

For the vast majority of players, combat in Civ4 was really boring.

So did I - in fact I initially was really excited about 1UPT and a more tactical combat system - but I assumed (silly me!) that the rest of the game would be designed to handle 1UPT in a sensible way. (Not so, as it turns out.) It's not a binary question - Civ4 combat or Civ5 combat with no other options - so as it stands, I'm not in favor of returning to stacks, but I'm most definitely in favor of fixing Civ5 combat so the AI can actually play the game. (A tactical battlemap or equivalent could still be a feasible solution, as I don't believe that Firaxis is going to rewrite the AI through patches.)

 

[LDiCesare]

Assume you had a genius AI, how would you solve the relative sizes of tiles vs armies vs world, the production times that these tile sizes imply in order to keep army sizes small (and the unbalanced relationship this creates between large and small city outputs in all categories), and the traffic jam nature of combat in a battlefield represented by tiles this large in relation to the rest of the world?

To me AI is the big factor, the rest is more or less irrelevant.
Long production times: Put more stuff to build. Like, you know, buildings. In order to build these, you have to remove the maintenance from buildings. If buildings gave interesting bonuses to your city, instead of being wasteful money sinks, you might build less units, notably settlers. Something like a granary that helps city growth (like in Civ I and all the following versions) instead of waiting for an hospital... Wait, why would anyone build a building that's so expensive at a time in the game when all your cities have already grown more than they will hardly grow more?
Regarding number of units: Make units require food for maintenance (or, as someone said, all units would require a strategic resource, but I'd probably hate that). Also provide costs that increase in an meaningful way (like a tank costs more to upkeep than an archer). A tank can easily defeat 100 warriors in this game without resting, it wouldn't be absurd if it cost 10 times as much to maintain.
As for traffic jams, larger maps could help. Make cities minimum distance increase, enlarge the map while retaining current population numbers. Ok, the computer may need more processing power for an Earth map with as many civs. Also note that a lot of the food surplus comes from maritime city states anyway, so I'd say removing these things altogether could help, but I am biased with regards to city-states for other reasons.

 

[Ahriman]

but I'm most definitely in favor of fixing Civ5 combat so the AI can actually play the game.

Absolutely.

(A tactical battlemap or equivalent could still be a feasible solution, as I don't believe that Firaxis is going to rewrite the AI through patches.)

AI improvements are more feasible than creating a tactical battlemap, which would be a major engine change. And IMO would feel very out of place.

 

[JohnnyW]

I'm thinking of ways to alleviate some of the problems of 1upt that are currently in the game. If anyone knows the answers to these questions I'd appreciate your response.

Obviously, this would just be a start. I would need to alter other things as well, but I believe this could be a decent place to begin.

 

[Ahriman]

Allowing cities to work beyond 3 tiles won't help anything.

The kind of play that Sulla is talking about, cities will barely ever work their second ring, let alone their their third.
The problem with cities are that the reward for being big and well-spaced isn't large enough, not that you can't space cities out enough.

Requiring a hardcap on units based on population will make ICS worse, not better, because its easier to have 8 pop4 cities (32 total pop) than to have 2 pop 16 cities.
It would also cripple the AI, since at current it doesn't focus on MCS so its cities aren't as large, and it relies on a huge army to pose any threat to the player.

There is a single parameter that sets minimum city distance I think, so you can hardcode-block ICS like that to some extent.

 

[aatami]

I completely agree with Ahriman. His oppinion is basically my oppinion.
I think we should give more thought on how to balance the situation. If we have enough voices and a good plan, they will listen to us (or at least they have stated that they listen to us at civfanatics).

 

[JohnnyW]

Allowing cities to work beyond 3 tiles won't help anything.

The kind of play that Sulla is talking about, cities will barely ever work their second ring, let alone their their third.
The problem with cities are that the reward for being big and well-spaced isn't large enough, not that you can't space cities out enough.

Requiring a hardcap on units based on population will make ICS worse, not better, because its easier to have 8 pop4 cities (32 total pop) than to have 2 pop 16 cities.
It would also cripple the AI, since at current it doesn't focus on MCS so its cities aren't as large, and it relies on a huge army to pose any threat to the player.

There is a single parameter that sets minimum city distance I think, so you can hardcode-block ICS like that to some extent.

The reason to extend workable tiles per city is to counterbalance the increased distance between them, obviously.

Also, this is for my mod idea which would have other modifications in place to help avoid ICS.

And yes, I know about:

<Row Name="MIN_CITY_RANGE">
<Value>2</Value>
</Row>

-that is why I asked about the other 2 features.

 

[Bill_in_PDX]

let him write, let them all write. his points about many of the mechanics are easy to see for anyone who plays the game. and he is so much more eloquent than ill ever be. i enjoyed the read.

but for a man who had a personal involvement in the development of Civ4.... Too often he compares Civ5 directly to Civ4 (its a fair comparision yes, one is the succesor of the other) however it is too direct a comparision for something that was never meant to take off directly from where the other left. the article reads very bitterly for me.

the game needs more analysis from a stand alone perspective.

Well said.

I would disagree with 1UPT being unsolvable, but then I also don't remember there being a genius AI in Civ4 who can handle tactical decisions well either.

That said, I still have a lot of respect for Sulla's comments past and present. I just disagree in this case overall. I can see how Civ5 isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I remember the torment of launching CivIII where corruption was crippling and many thought the game was a certain failure...

 

[builer680]

I like that terrain chokepoints can be used, and the power of opening multiple fronts. I have a problem with the other implications that 1UPT creates. The tile yields and the small city/big city production relationship in particular. To me this is huge.

I suppose I'll have to try out some of the yield/production mods. I have no doubt they improve things (what wouldn't?), but I can't help but think that they create other imbalances or issues of their own. That happens when you're forced to work with a faulty foundation.

 

[zuraffo]

One of the way to solve 1UPT problem is to have happiness cost attached to the unit. i.e. each military unit cost happiness to maintain, and when your happiness fall into the negative, the unit will just go into revolt (either disband or worse, turn against you). That way, player will have to limit both their cities and number of units.

I don't like this solution, it's crude, and it runs contrary to the concept of an empire building game, but if you take CiV as a tactical game, this might prove to be an effective solution.

If you REALLY want to limit the number of units and cities, make the happiness cost for cities and units grow exponentially.

 

[Dale]

Yeah... Civ4:Colonization is.... suicide-inducing. If someone enjoys THAT, I would like to meet him/her in person and have a good look at that phenomenon. I want to see that person micromanage for hours and enjoy it. Until such time, I think Civ4:Col made everybody very sad.

Nice to meet you. Would you care to arrange a time and place?

 

[Androrc the Orc]

Yeah... Civ4:Colonization is.... suicide-inducing. If someone enjoys THAT, I would like to meet him/her in person and have a good look at that phenomenon. I want to see that person micromanage for hours and enjoy it. Until such time, I think Civ4:Col made everybody very sad.

Indicate a meeting spot and I'll be there

 

[CivFanaticMan]

For the vast majority of players, combat in Civ4 was really boring.

As much as I find combat interesting in Civ5, I still have something to say about it. First off Civilization is a empire building game, not a war game. Wars were one thing that was fun in previous civs, not the moving units to attack part.

Tactical combat was something I really looked forward to, but because so much of what made previous Civs fun was sacrificed for tactical combat it just isn't worth it. If they can keep tactical combat and keep to the original design that made previous Civs so much fun then I think we would have ourselves a damn good game.

No one played Civ in the past for the combat. The 'fun' of the combat system shouldn't be something used as an argument to state why a certain Civ game is fun.

Its all about building a civilization.

 

[LAnkou]

Well, i'm struggling on my current game because of broken happiness mechanism (getting cities from the AI is crippling me? that's quite a reward for winning the war) and i just finished reading sullla's analysis...

I totally agree about the lack of reward for the player and not only because of what happened to me.
I conquer a city, what should i do to it? Annex will be bad for me, puppet also and i don't want to raze...waging wars is almost what is the most interesting things to do and it's a painfull thing to swallow? bad design...
i can't think of a way to have other civs being friendly, whereas it's so easy to get them mad
it's so much more efficient to focus on gold instead of production, but civilization is building an empire, not buying an empire...

I will give a chance to civ V for some more games because i still enjoy it now, but i really understand people who find it boring, especially competitive players. I'm not a good player, but i find it too easy to snowball or to crash. Recovery from a behind position is a hard thing in this game...

 

[fcolmenarez]

Yeah... Civ4:Colonization is.... suicide-inducing. If someone enjoys THAT, I would like to meet him/her in person and have a good look at that phenomenon. I want to see that person micromanage for hours and enjoy it. Until such time, I think Civ4:Col made everybody very sad.

I enjoyed playing Civ4:Col thank you very much, and I'm still here, so it must NOT be suicide inducing. The level of hyperbole in these forums is amazing. You assume that because you didn't enjoy it, nobody else sane should?

 

[Spoonwood]

Since I haven't gotten a response elsewhere, I'll pose this here...

Do the civ V AIs in anyway appear to play for a certain victory condition? In other words... do they play as if they had a goal of winning the game in a particular way?

 

[fcolmenarez]

Changing something just to change it has no merit. Those changes need to be an improvement. At the very least, those changes should not re-introduce problems that were solved in 4 previous games over 19 years, AND create entirely new ones to boot..

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. If you're trying something completely new you may not be able to solve things they way they were solved in previous iterations, without simply copying what worked before. If you do reintroduce problems that's bad, but to say: "just do what they did before" stifles creativity and change. THAT kind of argument is going down the Civ 4.5 road. (And I believe this is what causes people to accuse others of wanting Civ 4.5, I think it's unproductive to compare Civ 5 with previous games.

If you try to be innovative and produce the game with new features you may need to solve old problems within the context of your new model. To expect developers to completely avoid them because they had been solved before is unfair because those were solved WITHIN the context of the previous model. Whenever you change things you run the risk of running into old problems and creating new ones. But you still have to solve them within your new game engine.

 

[fcolmenarez]

Since I haven't gotten a response elsewhere, I'll pose this here...

Do the civ V AIs in anyway appear to play for a certain victory condition? In other words... do they play as if they had a goal of winning the game in a particular way?

I think this could plausibly explain some weird AI behavior. Sulla notices that some AIs don't seem to expand. It may be that they're trying for a cultural victory. Within this context it makes perfect sense to not fill the continent with lots of cities.

 

[lschnarch]

And people point to how PG had more hexes with which to work and that somehow this made things EASIER to program its AI?

It is not the pure number of tiles or hexes, it is about freedom to manouvre your units around.
That is one of the biggest problems in Shafer_5.

And not to mention the fact that PG combat was a good bit more complex than CiV in terms of how various types of units performed against one another. PGs 1994 AI seemed to be able to take THOSE issues into account a hell of a lot better than what we see in CiV.

People really seem to not see what Panzer General was: mainly a scenario-based game with a given number of units for the defender, low number of replacements and - most important! - typically a one-way-street-like flow of movements.

And, very important, you did have support fire. Why this has not been implemented in Shafer_5 is completely beyond me. I can only guess that the completely misdesigned archer-type units would have become even more obviously stronger than their successors, the fire-arm infantry.

You did start in clearly defined positions, you had clearly defined targets and a very restricted timespan to use.

So, the "grand strategy" for the AI was quite easy (in comparison) to program. And yet, it made many severe faults.
Tactically, it was mostly better, but nevertheless not much of an obstacle for the human.
The biggest problem was the limited time. Typically, for an overwhelming victory you only had ~12 to 15 turns time. Maybe 16 to 20 for a standard victory. A bit more for a minor victory. Beyond that, you would have lost.

So, creating an AI for such a game is not as complex as it is for a Civilization game.

Defenders of CiV say PG had well-defined objectives. And CiV does not? It would seem to me that if the AI is at war with me it would not be incredibly hard to teach it to regard my cities or resources in the way that PG regarded those victory point hexes.

First of all, defending typically is easier than attacking.
In the PG scenarios where the AI was to attack, it typically had overwhelmingly more units, very often even better units.

Second, PG took place on pre-made maps. Number, type and starting position of units were balanced against these maps. This is obviously not true for a Civilization game.

Third, due to more space, in general much higher movement rates and no eras going by, the AI could try to outflank you. In Shafer_5, in most cases the map holds just one obstacle after the other, minimizing the speed of units.
Cities in Shafer_5 are much closer located to each other than victory points were in Panzer General. Both, human as AI could really manouvre their units.

I will be the first to admit that I am not a programmer and have never tried to craft a tactical AI. But I do not see ANY reason (other than lack of skill and/or experience on the part of the programmers) why CiV should be so utterly and completely inferior to PG from a tactical standpoint.

In my last game I had innumerable opportunities to wipe out unscreened siege units as they wandered aimlessly about while purporting to "invade" me. Including one occasion where the AI decided to mount an invasion consisting of three artillery units and exactly nothing else. What exactly was that supposed to accomplish? Lots of hexes, fewer hexes, defined objectives or not - that is just plain stupid, ridiculous, and immersion-breaking.

Defending the CiV tactical AI is kind of like defending the US college football BCS system. I guess you can do it, and you will see some people try. But the arguments they use are never particularly logical and never completely make sense.

To this one I agree.
The deficencies of programming are on top of the design-inducted problems.

Which, measured against the advertising is such a shame that one misses the words to express it.
Yes, Shafer_5's AI is in many cases even weaker than PG's AI. After having tested 1.141 now in some games, I would even say, in most cases.

Nevertheless, even PG's AI was quite weak.

And I say it quite frankly: whoever was testing this AI should give a s**t about the NDA and tell the truth (in case the developers really didn't listen, as some try to indicate), or should remain silent and turn away in shame (as I think most testers were just too enthusiastic about being "awarded" by their tester status to really have a close look to what was going on) .

 

[Burnmelt]

I just don't see why settlers shouldn't cost more every time you make 1. Ie, production/gold cost doubles each time. I pulling "doubles" out of a hat, the actual number would be subject to actual gameplay balance.