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

[drachasor]

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.

Think if they modernized and customized it though? So each civ had its own set of advisors that spoke with the proper accent, etc, etc (and properly hammed it up). It would be pretty awesome.

 

[Louis XXIV]

I'll be honest, looking back through the eyes of nostalgia, I miss the Civ2 advisers. At the time, they annoyed the hell out of me. I can't remember how many times that pop up asking if I wanted to see my council came up and had annoying it was. How often do I need some guy shouting BUILD CITY WALLS!

However, since then, I've started to miss them. Civ3's advisers were at least somewhat helpful. Civ4 basically got rid of them entirely (although, with the exception of the military adviser, I think the menus themselves were the most helpful). Civ5 at least brings back the council to some degree and what they say can be amusing, but it doesn't have quite as much character.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

In Civ 2 we found ourselves watching the wonder movies thousands of times, every single time like it the first one, with the eyes of a children BTW.

Yeah, just as you say gunter. And they're a welcome pause - a little bit of punctuation in the game (oh, hey, I got to the Sistine Chapel and I'm still here) and something I've always enjoyed sitting back and savouring. But remember that Civ3 abolished them too:

http://www.civ3.com/faq2.cfm

Are there wonder movies in Civ III?
We have created a beautiful and fun world in Civ III and felt that the Wonder movies of the past would take you out of that world and interrupt the gameplay experience. In Civ III, building a Wonder triggers a reward screen that captures the flavor of the Wonder movies without disrupting the flow of your game.

Plus ca change. As many people pointed out at that time, the whole point of them was to make you sit back from the game play and savour things for a moment (and personally, I don't have a problem with losing the 'flow of the game' - Civ 5 sometimes takes longer between turns than the longest Civ4 Wonder movie, just for a start). So they came back for Civ4, and maybe they'll return for Civ6 if it ever happens.

I think modders should offer a convenient way (if it's possible) for legitimate owners of of Wonder Movies (Civ4, or even the CTPs, which had some rather good ones) to plug those into Civ5. Might look into it myself. Worth cataloguing them anyway, and there's the quite bizarre and wonderful ones from SMAC too - the best of the lot, frankly - though I'm not sure any of those would work with a regular Civ.

[Actually, now I'm about to install the two CTPs (after many years) and Civ3, which was at least on my last machine. Wish I know what happened to my old copy of Civ2, though...]

 

[Conspirator]

Well Civ 3 had the Palace which also was pretty fun.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

Well Civ 3 had the Palace which also was pretty fun.

Oh yes, of course. I'm just about to reinstall Civ3 too. What we really need is to be able to mod in some Victory movies though - the current set up is just too boring...

 

[shinkicker]

Civ V doesn't seem to have those memory issues at least, so you can actually *play* the game!

Whether or not the issue is a memleak, I don't know. But if you load a game from within a running game, without exiting to the main menu, you are much more likely to crash.

And, of course, as the game runs longer and more terrain/units are revealed, we start to get those interminable "Please Wait" pauses as the AI thinks things over. Not so much a memleak as a function of individual CPU speed, I assume, but it lobbies against huge maps with dozens of Civs.

The one patch we've had actually introduced a new bug (the "Choose Production" bug after you accept multiple cities in a peace deal and puppet them). I'd just as soon future patches were tested enough to prevent that kind of thing.

 

[shinkicker]

[Actually, now I'm about to install the two CTPs (after many years) and Civ3, which was at least on my last machine. Wish I know what happened to my old copy of Civ2, though...]

http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/civilization-2.php

 

[duxup]

Considering the rough around the edges nature of Civ V the wonder paintings seem less like a well thought out atheistic choice, and more like something quick and easy to do. For the techs they couldn't even be bothered to change most of the tech quotes...

Also I wonder how much longer the QA process takes since they fired a bunch of QA people a few months ago.

I'm sure he's a good guy but dude pretty much said the same thing you hear from every developer even before a game is released... and look at what we got. I like the core game but the serious polish issues and your standard PR lines doesn't instill me with much confidence.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/civilization-2.php

Hey, many thanks for that! I've just found my old copy of Civ2 ToT, but that doesn't really count, pretty naff stuff. But I've been wondering how regular Civ2 would look after all these years...

 

[evrett37]

Why are we still begging for scraps at a table 3000 miles away from the actual developers ? Are we going to organize and change the toxic "be advertised to" communication relationship or do we just want more of the same ?

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Yeah, those advisors were a classy touch.


Why they got rid of marvellous features and replaced them with paint shop amatorial excercises ?

I didn't think I'd like them when I heard about them, but I kind of like the new wonder "videos."

 

[zonk]

Perhaps Greg or someone in the know might enlighten us as to how they're approaching the truly awful AI...

I'm not a hardcore modder, but I was tinkering and thinkering last night about how to fix it, and I have to say -- I'm concerned.

Let's face it - the AI in I through IV was never all that bright anyway... BUT - you could paper over a lot of its faults by simply giving it huge bonuses or cheaper units. You could counter player exploits by adding unit attributes and changing AI build priorities. It wasn't perfect - but it worked, to some extent - because you could just always make the AI's lumbering stack larger, less costly, and more effective. The end result is that you never really "fixed" the AI (and yes, I'm of the opinion that without "true" AI -- and who wants to risk dealing with cylons genociding our grandkids -- you'll never make an AI algorithm as effective as a human player) - but since military play was only one aspect of Civ, you really just needed to make it tough enough to give the human player something worry about.

V, though, requires a completely and radically different approach. You're NEVER going to be able to solve it by reducing unit costs or giving the AI ungodly advantages with size. It's not even a matter of countering or balancing specific units.

In a hex/1UpT game -- the AI has to be able to analyze each battle or at least each campaign situation independently. It has to know how to position fast attack, melee, ranged, and siege units appropriately, then also shift that deployment as the field changes. It needs to know that sometimes NO moves is the best move. It needs to recognize that there are occasions where sacrificing X to save Y is the right move.

In short - it really does have to become a truly tactical AI... and Civilization has NEVER had anything close to that. It's never NEEDED anything close to that.

As much as I still like (or want to like) hex/1UpT - I worry that there is literally so much that needs to be done and what needs to be done is so radical, that for one thing -- other aspects (and I think there are other aspects that are a mess) will suffer.... Civilization was never supposed to be a military strategy game - I'd hate for it to become that - but it seems there is no other choice.

 

[cephalo]

I think the big problem with the Civ4 wonder movies was that they were not in any way informative. They were just extremely generic movies with no soul. It was like watching the fancy CGI that you see before a news program.

The Civ2 movies were like mini-documentaries. They tought you at least something about the wonder you just built. For example, I think the Sun Tzu's War Academy movie was the first time I learned about the terra-cotta warriors. That's a pretty cool thing to learn about while playing a game. I played every game with the movies on and almost never skipped them.

 

[shinkicker]

Hey, many thanks for that! I've just found my old copy of Civ2 ToT, but that doesn't really count, pretty naff stuff. But I've been wondering how regular Civ2 would look after all these years...

I downloaded that and will probably install it later today. But first I have a ton of XML files to finish writing for my first stab at a Civ5 mod

 

[Auncien]

Thanks for the information.

As to his message, however, It sounds a lot like PR damage control for a rushed product. I won't believe anything these people say until I see results.

 

[mmmfloorpie]

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).

The one thing I hate about the Civlopedia is that the narration of it is more like a storybook than what we've come to expect in our Civlopedias. The entries are just 2 paragraph stories about the history of whatever it is you are looking up. There is hardly any information relevant to the game actually contained in it.

When I look something up in the pedia, I want bare STATS! Tell me the defensive bonus or a tile or a unit or the benefits/negatives of buildings and etc.

I can't really bring up any specific examples as I haven't played the game in a while, but I just found when I was researching something like plains the entry would just be something like "plains are very important locations that were traditionally used for raising cattle and building villages, dating as far back as ancient Mesopotamia."

Like I don't care! I would much prefer the blurb plus "Defensive bonus: -10, Yields: 2 food, 1 hammer, 2 coins Yield with X improvement: etc etc"

It's the same way with units I find. Yes it tells you what tech it requires and what it upgrades to, but I just feel there is vital stats missing. I'll go home and play it and post specifics after work!

 

[SomethingWitty]

Civ IV wasn't as rushed as Civ V (though IV had many similar issues like a bad engine and poor AI, Civ V seems a bit worse in just how bad these are). As such, it might be a bit longer than that.

Are you kidding? Civ IV's launch was way, way worse than this.

 

[Mathochism]

I'm actually surprised that I'm hearing so much on these forums about instability in Civ V, since I've yet to experience any sort of bug or crash in the 40 or so hours I've played so far.

 

[duxup]

Are you kidding? Civ IV's launch was way, way worse than this.

Civ IV wasn't perfect when released, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the shape Civ V was / is in.

 

[Celevin]

Civ IV wasn't perfect when released, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the shape Civ V was / is in.

Civ4 was UNPLAYABLE and had an absolutely horrible launch. I picked up Civ5, started a game, found some depth, and had fun killing coms. There are some serious bugs and balance issues but there's nothing stopping me from enjoying it. The biggest fault about Civ5 is there's so many player decisions (in war, in policies, in buildings) that the AI needs to be at a much higher level to compete.

I don't think people remember Civ4. All I think people are remembering is the final Civ4+BTS product, which still had some horrible mechanics that I would've wanted ironed out. Even with all the improvements, ICS was much easier in Civ4, the AI was much worse at war, and several parts of the game could be simply ignored. Stop with the nostalgia and actually compare the two.