Recent content by Deggit

Overall, I think AI agendas were an interesting idea but should be eliminated. Sid Meier (or Soren Johnson? I forget) said something about this during a game design talk. He said that it's not fair to make the AI react according to rules that the player would not value. So like let's say...

I'm not surprised at how overwhelmingly people voted for E. The beginning of a Civ game has always been the most interesting part, in every version of the game. #1 you have fewer things to manage, #2 each thing matters more, and #3 the difference between things matters more. The difference...

The AI will never "play chess"! It's impossible! :) The AI could hardly even manage Civ III's economy, and that one had things like ICS and lumberjacking where players exploited the economy in ways the developers never even anticipated. Then in Civ IV there was already things like great people...

Civ maps have been shrinking for 10 years. The largest, in terms of # of tiles, maps were the Huge world maps from the Civ III era. I still laugh when I see Civ 5 players debating "Tall vs Wide" and they mean a 4 city empire vs an 8 city empire. In Civ III you usually had 10-12 cities in the...

Yep, that's another good way of putting it. People are saying "The AI was always bad" - this is true but it misses the point. In every game from up to V (and I assume in VI as well?) the AI is the exact same script at every difficulty level, it's just given lots of freebies and cheats at high...

I agree completely, Lord Shadow...except that I think a complexity ceiling on the wargame subsystem is a feature, not a problem. :) It means there is more room for complexity in other parts of the game, for the AI to calculate and for the player to keep in mind. Sid Meier's Civ started the 4X...

In many ways, Civ IV was just "Civ III Conquests done right." It was essentially the same game as III with one or two new gimmicks. If you read the designer notes by Soren, he doesn't really seem to have had any ambitions for the game other than to patch the macro design problems of III like...

The core of the problem is that the game engine produces too many units. If they are spread out in a carpet they are a nightmare to manage and the AI can't handle it; if they are concentrated in a stack it feels pointless. And either way movement and battles take way too many clicks and too...

It seems like in every Civ game, there is one mechanic on launch that just shows ZERO understanding of city economics. In vanilla Civ V it was the maritime food bonus. They fought ICS throughout the entire design and then, seemingly as an afterthought, there's a mechanic where if you ally with...

Exactly like you said, Civ is NOT a war game, that's why it has always been wrong to take the 1UPT system from wargames like Shafer did. It is a game about building things and in general the player who is more successful at building up his productive forces, should win the damn game either by...

I'm not saying that the AI is good at stack combat, I'm saying something a little different. I agree with you that Civ4 and Civ3 AI was bad, the truth is that the AI has always been bad at the strategic layer.... it only becomes remotely competitive when you give it free units (either directly...

In one word: YES. Think about it like this. Suppose you, the player, have just lost a war to an AI. What are some acceptable reasons for a player to lose a war? "I lost the war because..." I didn't build enough units, so I was outnumbered. I was behind in military technology, so my units were...

More than one year ago, Soren Johnson (the lead designer of Civ IV) was asked his thoughts about 1UPT in a Reddit AMA. His reply was diplomatic: I am very glad they tried it as it was certainly on my short-list of ideas for Civ that hadn't been done yet. Obviously, 1UPT creates some serious AI...

I totally agree with this post.