2K Greg's recent posts on the 2K forums

[zonk]

But it isn't a war game! The two of you keep saying it's a wargame then go on ranting about non-relevant stuff without ever backup up your claim. It's just a really long troll at this point.

And FYI

Small empires actually dominate in happiness/GAs and cultural policy branches. It's the first Civ game to actively discourage imperial sprawl with no drawbacks (well Soren tried uber corruption in Civ3, but you people hated it)

OK... so... if you're not into a warfare focus game, your answer is to essentially play one city challenge? And who cares about dominating happiness? Adding a "happy heaven" victory condition isn't going to make that matter... it would just add another way to click through 1000 boring next turns, with a tiny handful of automatic builds and Adopt Policy clicks sprinkled in every few centuries.

 

[Thormodr]

THIS explains EVERYTHING. I am serious. You just need to read Soren's epilogue of civ4's design vision (at the end of civ4 manual), and compare it to Shafer's vision. I am serious, not whining or anything.

You can pretty much understand what happened after comparing both visions. The first is a vision of grandeur, of a boy dreaming of building the ultimate empire building game... the latter is the vision of a boy building a wargame with some cities in between that serve as tank obstacles (if you reach that era with AI's left, that is).

The difference is immense, and is reflected in the game design.

That, and the fact that Soren graduated from Stanford... the other guy, well, as far as I know, is one of the top 10 of UoL (University of Life).

'Nough said.

Pretty well dead on. There is a thread on 2K Games that talks about it. It toes the line a bit because if you have a thread critical about the game, it tends to get deleted by the mods.

Anyway, this thread talks about how Civs I through IV were designed with the god game principle in mind. Sort of like a god game sandbox. ciV is designed with a board game design. The series has been altered significantly and in my opinion, not for the better. That is why ciV has been so polarizing.

Here is the thread:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1196145

A short snippet from it:

I really think it's the totally different game design ideals of each game type (and the extent to which players agree/disagree with those ideals) that is fueling 99% of disputes between players.

God game design principles:

* In god games, designers aim to create a believable miniature living world for us to play with.
* The playability/enjoyment for the player is in finding and tweaking the details and watching cause and effect principles in action. In other words, it's about letting the player experiment and 'play' with this alternative world to see what happens.
* The rules of god games are adapted to fit around the constraints imposed by real-world considerations and the setting of the game world (historical in this case). So the immersiveness of the game world comes first, the 'game' (what you need to achieve in order to win) comes second.
* The fun of god games comes from the "what-if's" and the seemingly unlimited possibilities for developing new strategies to achieve a better result next time. It stems from god-games creating an environment where it's not totally clear exactly how to win. Put another way, it's more about competing with yourself - the satisfaction of progressively optimising your performance in order to win better/smarter.

This is how the Civ series has been designed until now. This has been the expectation and accepted 'Civ way' of doing things. The design team were all about adding little touches to create more immersion and believability in the miniature world they created. They wanted everything to feel alive and somewhat unpredicatable - and for us to have access to play with every little aspect in order to win the game in a very organic way.

...So look at this list and think about Civs 1,2,3 and 4. It should be clear that Civs 1 to 4 were designed by people from the God-game school of design.

Now compare that to the principles of board game design...

Board game design principles:

* Board games have no interest in recreating/simulating any form of reality - it's all about creating a FUN GAME based on an abstracted theme.
* Board game designers are experts in distilling complex themes down into a few hard but logical rules that act as nicely defined limits of the game.
* In board games, LESS IS MORE. The best board games are those where the theme can be nicely represented by, and abstracted into as few rules as possible - but still allow huge scope for alternative strategies to be employed within them.
* The fun/challenge of playing board games is developing strategies to master these limited rules and compete against others.
* Board games are not about experimentation and what-if's as much as applying the rules to achieve a definite victory over competitors.

Civ V was designed by Jon Shafer - who I would strongly suggest comes from the board-game school of design.

ciV is a war game at heart. That's what JS loves and tried to bring to us all. The problem is, the AI is so crappy it utterly fails at that.

 

[da_Vinci]

Well, since 2K Greg is not showing up here,
I thought I copy here his posts on 2K forums, as lately.

I do search on his posts on 2K forums to get his words on how things are...
I look for new posts, as possible. I quote here what I find interesting for us, CFC:

So:

Oct 6th:

[snip]

and:
"We are all working hard to improve Civilization V as quickly as possible.

But keep in mind that the last thing we want to do is introduce new issues. So these patches need to go through a rigorous QA cycle of testing and fixing more, and that takes time."

Too bad the game itself didn't get that "rigorous QA cycle of testing and fixing" before it was released!

dV

 

[Orion66]

Keep it updated and maybe it is worth to stick it to forum?

 

[timtofly]

So in other words, Jon gave us a "war" game, but took the "war" out of it to please both sides, but ended up pleasing no one.

However he made it moddable so that both sides can shape the game the way they want it to be shaped. When the modders give up on the game, then I think the game will be a failure.

 

[Drakarska]

Indeed. I'm not so sure it bodes well for any nation if the emperor is advised by: a psychotic military advisor, an ultra egghead, a marketing VP, a Russian? French? spy, and an Elvis impersonator.

Oh C'mon bro. You can't really tell me that you didn't laugh your arse of the first time you Mil Ad came up to you dressed in full chain, half drunk AND holding a cup of mead while stating " All is well Sire, and this pleases me mightily", and the dramatically exits in a drunken walk. I may just have to reinstall II again, just to show my youngest. Hilarity at it's finest.

 

[zonk]

So in other words, Jon gave us a "war" game, but took the "war" out of it to please both sides, but ended up pleasing no one.

However he made it moddable so that both sides can shape the game the way they want it to be shaped. When the modders give up on the game, then I think the game will be a failure.

That concerns me... Afforess' review was less than glowing (and I love AND) - when a modder says he's "bored" with the game less than a week in, that doesn't speak well for one to then devote what I imagine are hundreds if not thousands of hours of work on something they give away for free. I hear zap is already tinkering, though.

If this is the route they're gonna go -- then I wish they'd just do what Paradox did with the Europa engine when they moved on to Clausewitz -- license out the core engine to modders. A lot of HOI players really hate Hoi3 -- but hey -- Europa is fairly cheap to grab, and modders have already pumped out a couple Hoi2 derivatives built on it... .and they make a bit of scratch (Arsenal of Democracy, an HOI2 ARM expansion, could be had for $5).

I would have gladly paid $50 -- if I had to - for Rise of Mankind. I would have gladly - if I had to - paid $30 for the AND mod-mod.

I'm not looking forward to throwing another $30 after the initial $100 (yeah, you're looking at idiot that bought the "special edition") on whatever V expansion... I suppose I'm in for a penny in for a pound at this point, but unlike previous iterations including this one that were really "auto buys" -- I won't be for VI.

If it gets back to its empire builder with warfare aspects root rather than what seems to be the current warfare sim with empire building aspects, maybe...

 

[Gazebo]

Civ V crashes a lot. Much more than Civ IV did even with the memory leak. There's also the bug where you can't declare war on someone ever. Civ V has really, really stupid AI on almost every level. I'll grant Civ IV was stupid too, but Civ V seems noticeably dumber. I don't exploit the AI, but it just blunders in to you acting stupid with its troops, irrational with its deals, etc, etc.

Combine that with the poor civilpedia (which has lots of missing info and some wrong info) and other information you just can't get (maintenance for troops), inability to get rid of built buildings, and so on and so forth, and the game is lacking a certain level of polish.

Don't get me wrong, I like Civ V and I like pretty much everything it has done. Heck, I even like how there isn't a silly rush to get a belief system for your people at the beginning of the game. I reluctantly must admit it was released in worse shape than Civ IV though. Naturally EVERY civ has had a crappy engine and crappy AI...it just seems to me V is notably worse than IV on release (I don't really remember how III or II were and never played I).

Played 40 hours and not one crash. Probably your system, not the game. 90% of computer problems are hardware, firmware and OS related, not software.

 

[Orion66]

I havent had a crash neither

 

[Guardian_PL]

I havent had a crash neither

Really? Not even when you're halfway through the game, and then reload the game for whatever reason? If that doesn't ctd the game for you then you're lucky man - I have to restart Civ5 every time I want to load up a save, it works only once and then crashes.

 

[Conspirator]

I don't have that problem Guardian and I've got an under minimum requirement machine. People were telling me it wouldn't work. It works fine, even on larger maps. It does start crashing later on in the game though, and strategic view is not usable because it crashed after 1 or 2 turns.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Really? Not even when you're halfway through the game, and then reload the game for whatever reason? If that doesn't ctd the game for you then you're lucky man - I have to restart Civ5 every time I want to load up a save, it works only once and then crashes.

Nah, I have had some of what I call graphical slowness (I'm just slightly above min spec), but no crashes or anything like that.

When CivIV came out it was unplayable for me for like two weeks.

 

[Abegweit]

Probably your system, not the game. 90% of computer problems are hardware, firmware and OS related, not software.

Bullcrap. Almost all crashes take place in application software with drivers being a distant second. And Civ5 is no exception. I've had a couple but they're scarcely game-breakers like the gameplay is.

I also have a turn 0 loss in my HOF. That undoubtedly is a hardware failure.

I'll probably post a pic at some point.

 

[DioAurion]

I've played through a game and a half, and my 3 friends have all played about 75% of a game so far. No crashes. Maybe because we never reload our games to redo moves?

 

[Andoo]

I'v been playing civ5 for 80+ hrs and no crash on my machine yet(w7,dx11). But I had one crash when I played dx9 mode at my friend's house though.

 

[Infiltrator]

Since this is about Greg's recent posts..

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93333

 

[nokmirt]

About 2k Greg's posts. Sounds like they are taking their time. They know what their doing, we just have to be patient. That's not much of a virtue around here lately.

 

[Mahi]

No crashes here either and I'm playing on an ancient 3ghz singlecore, 2.5 gb RAM and NVIDIA 8600 GT.

Seriously I haven't had a single crash so far and the AI rounds take around 15 second max! in the late game. So far I have only played standard sized maps though with standard amount of AI's.
I hear all these complaints about how slow the game is with their super rigged computers and here I am running the game just fine. I wonder if there's some bad coding for the game when running the game in multicored systems?

 

[duxup]

About 2k Greg's posts. Sounds like they are taking their time. They know what their doing, we just have to be patient. That's not much of a virtue around here lately.

I can't speak directly to any particular developer or Greg, but Firaxis / 2K had a lot of time, fired some devs and QA folks a while ago, and chose to release Civ V in a very messy state. I don't blame anyone for being concerned / short on patience considering the current state of the game.

 

[Aristos]

Call it Civilization: Total War -- but give the mainline title to someone that appreciates the fact that you were supposed to be able to enjoy the title without ever firing a single arrow.

Spot on. I only disagree with the title you propose; it should be more like...

Consivilization: Involution.