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

[Venereus]

Wrong. I managed to build quite large empire on emperor. But that's not simple task - you should manage happiness as hell. And I found that really cool.

Moreover I could mirror that - in previous Civ there was a big sign "Expand!", since you can't win by being small.

Yes you can. You wouldn't want to, but you can.

 

[V. Soma]

Greg's posts in OP updated

 

[stealth_nsk]

Yes you can. You wouldn't want to, but you can.

I meant there are no reasons to. Winning with small empire in Civ 4 is handicap, not strategy.

 

[jmik99]

Oct 8th:
This
"Animations are not simply something that we turned off and forgot to provide an option for. There are underlying technical reasons why they aren't in multiplayer at this time. We will be evaluating what it would take to allow them in multiplayer, but at this time I don't have any guarantee that it will be added. We definitely have heard your feedback on the issue though."

I love Civ V and single play, but multiplayer is the real thing for me. If they don't implement combat animations, it will be fail beyond belief. It will be the death of Civ V in the long run, I'm afraid.

Seriously, I can't understand how this could be so difficult. It was in there before.

 

[Venereus]

I meant there are no reasons to. Winning with small empire in Civ 4 is handicap, not strategy.

Personal experience. Got boxed into 4 cities in the mainland and a few other in nearby islands, just enough for the national wonders requirements. Didn't start military expansion because of favorable diplomatic situation. Thanks to good teching I got several religions and holy cities. I ended up with a Cultural win. Wasn't easy though.

So, sure, it was a handicap, but you could play it.

 

[lschnarch]

Oct 7th
This.

"the future of hotseat. Yep we're adding it, but I don't have any sort of ETA yet"

Didn't Shafer announce the PBEM and Hotseat functions to come around a month later?

Weren't we told that one of the reasons to go with Steam was about easy implementation of mp functionality?

This game in its total is really a desaster.

 

[Guardian_PL]

I love Civ V and single play, but multiplayer is the real thing for me. If they don't implement combat animations, it will be fail beyond belief. It will be the death of Civ V in the long run, I'm afraid.

Seriously, I can't understand how this could be so difficult. It was in there before.

I don't play multi yet, but are you serious? Combat animations, like watching little arrows go "plink, plink" and your guys falling to the ground? In my multi games I'll kick all the #censored# who have that crap on out of the game, I mean that takes bloody ages for no reason, getting insanely dull after a short while...

I just don't get it, wonder movies (that you'll watch a different one each time, and thirty in total over the course of whole game, and you can skip it whenever you wish) bad, combat animation (same bore over and over and OVER again that you'll experience like 300 times+ in one game, can't skip, have to wait it through) - good?

It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

 

[masterminded]

I totally agree with this, this is really the first Civ to solve this problem, and I like the solution.

Interesting choice of language. In this post and many others, you assume that greatly expanding over time is something that needs to be put in check to make the game balanced. I think this is purely due to your own preferences and that of a few others for small empires. It's also incredibly counterintuitive. Until the modern era and the rise of nationalism, growing geographically and spreading their respective cultures and institutions to other lands, often at an awe inspiring pace, was commonplace. Lacking in expansion was associated with mediocrity, small power status, and stagnation. The manner in which Civ V rewards stagnation makes absolutely no sense in the context of forging a civilization that dominates the world. This is about being a world leader, not Switzerland (as awesome as Switzerland is). The way prior games functioned in regard to expansion makes sense.

Edit: I think my perspective is better informed by my background. I have done graduate work in International Relations. To be a bit crass for the sake of brevity, with few exceptions, political scientists tend to view the international system as one of anarchy. This system incentivizes expansion for the sake of survival. If expansion isn't feasible, it encourages bandwagoning or balancing. The powers that do this are seldom if ever great. How the developers reached the conclusion that is even remotely realistic that a small power can dominate the world in any respect and win the game is beyond me. It is ridiculous on its face.

Of course, expansion has its trade-offs. It's not an unalloyed good and this needs to be reflected in the game. But as I've argued elsewhere, the system in Civ V is too one-dimensional, shallow, heavy-handed, and onerous. It allows little margin to explore various strategies and expects the player pursue victory strategies that are too linear.

 

[jjkrause84]

I think this should work for you, even if you don't own CIV on Steam...

http://storefront.steampowered.com/Manuals/3900/manual.pdf?l=english

You can read it near the end of the pdf.

Thanks, man...what a cool read.

No wonder Civ4 was so great...Soren Johnson just plain GOT IT. He totally understood game design and what made Civilization (as a game) tick. Some great quotes:

[When talking about preventing the player from building too many cities] "Like all penalties, there is the danger of it becoming “unfun” – a burden to the player that might balance the game but suck the enjoyment out of it."

"In previous versions of Civ, worker options were mostly
limited to farms or mines, increasing food or production.The
tedium came from the fact that there were only two choices – and
often one of them was the obvious best choice.

Therefore,we added a slew of new worker options.Workshops,
windmills, and watermills became new choices for increasing food,
production, or commerce depending on the local environment.
Cottages created an interesting option for commerce – over time,
they would grow into hamlets, then villages, and finally towns, with each level producing more and more commerce.A number of new improvements were created to match the resources, such as pastures for cattle, plantations for silk, and wells for oil."


- Now we have...what...farms, TPs and mines (oh, yeah...and lumbermills)? Certainly no windmills, watermills, workshops, etc.

 

[sovarn]

Here is a post in Soren's blog: http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=276

Watch the first video (it is an hour long) but he compares how he improved civ 3/4 over the previous incarnations. You can see from the video which takes about AI that he understands what makes a fun game.

Basically he compares a 'good' Ai vs a 'fun' ai where the good ai plays to win like a human but a fun ai has a little more roleplaying aspect to it.

Not related to civ 5 in any way but if you watch the video you will see that soren just understands what a civ game is.

I would tend to agree with the other posters that our gut instinct is not to like the game because it is fundamentaly different. Civ 5 is a good game just not a Civ game.

 

[jmik99]

I don't play multi yet, but are you serious? Combat animations, like watching little arrows go "plink, plink" and your guys falling to the ground? In my multi games I'll kick all the #censored# who have that crap on out of the game, I mean that takes bloody ages for no reason, getting insanely dull after a short while...

I just don't get it, wonder movies (that you'll watch a different one each time, and thirty in total over the course of whole game, and you can skip it whenever you wish) bad, combat animation (same bore over and over and OVER again that you'll experience like 300 times+ in one game, can't skip, have to wait it through) - good?

It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Yes, I'm serious. Animations are part of the game. I like them. At least let us have an option. It just seems unprofessional to exclude them in multi player.

Every detail count in my book to get this game up where it belongs.

 

[silentknight111]

I understand not wanting animations, and having them off by default.

But for us people who only play multiplayer with our friends and loved ones, and are not in a rush to finish a game in a day, we'd like to have the option of turning them on.

 

[Conspirator]

Here is a post in Soren's blog: http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=276

Watch the first video (it is an hour long) but he compares how he improved civ 3/4 over the previous incarnations. You can see from the video which takes about AI that he understands what makes a fun game.

Basically he compares a 'good' Ai vs a 'fun' ai where the good ai plays to win like a human but a fun ai has a little more roleplaying aspect to it.

Not related to civ 5 in any way but if you watch the video you will see that soren just understands what a civ game is.

I would tend to agree with the other posters that our gut instinct is not to like the game because it is fundamentaly different. Civ 5 is a good game just not a Civ game.

Yeah Civ 4 was just a joy to play, the feeling of getting a large empire, loads of workers, a huge army, the wonders, the civics, everything just made the game feel like you were actually running an empire. Civ 5 just doesn't have that feeling. The cities just don't feel like they're one cohesive body any more.

Is it me or does it strike you that the developers of Civ 5 just didn't play Civ 4? It's like they played Civ 3 but never played Civ 4 too much.

Don't get me wrong. The first time I loaded up Civ 4 I was like: what the hell have they done to civ. Civ 3 had the same feeling to me, the first time i loaded it up I was like: they've ruined it. I didn't get that with Civ 5. It seemed pretty much identical when I first loaded it up, but unlike Civ 3 and 4, I just can't bring myself to play another game even though I've only played 2 full games!

 

[Louis XXIV]

I can guarantee that's not the case since quite a few of the same developers of Civ4 developed Civ5.

 

[Bad Brett]

What ended up happening was players would start a game, discover they rolled a poor dice and was neighbours with a Civ who hated them and refused to trade w/ them for no particular reason. This then prevent any trades, include tech trades, and players simply fell behind for no reason. It created an inequity of opportunities (some Civs could trade, and some couldn't) which wasn't present in previous Civ games, and was completely removed from Civ:Warlords and BTS when it became clear the block system was a failure in practice. Religion was then overpowered to compensate for this and also to sort of revive the bloc system, as a religious war, whereby one patch of land under one religion would collectively war with another.

But this was part of the challenge. You actually had to do things for them to like you. You knew that Isabella would hate you, unless you joined her religion. On the other hand, you knew that Washington wouldn't care. You know that Monty eventually would attack you, while Gandhi probably wouldn't.

When you shared the same religion, civics and had a mutual enemy, you felt safe. It actually felt like you had an ally that you would never touch, because you could win a domination victory anyway. But this is no longer possible.

 

[sovarn]

This is exactly it i think. Civ 4 made you feel part of the world. I would actually care and hate my neighbours depending on what had happened.

It is the emotional connection we have within the game - the narrative - that makes civ. Otherwise it is just another TBS game.

 

[Guardian_PL]

This is exactly it i think. Civ 4 made you feel part of the world. I would actually care and hate my neighbours depending on what had happened.

It is the emotional connection we have within the game - the narrative - that makes civ. Otherwise it is just another TBS game.

Well said, I couldn't describe the spirit of civ games more

 

[tom2050]

"Animations are not simply something that we turned off and forgot to provide an option for. There are underlying technical reasons why they aren't in multiplayer at this time. We will be evaluating what it would take to allow them in multiplayer, but at this time I don't have any guarantee that it will be added. We definitely have heard your feedback on the issue though."

Seriously, what kind of crap is this? It's like a bad joke. Animations aren't available because of MP tech issues? (which may NEVER get fixed)! I'm guessing something with Steam, or something with DLC is the "unknown" cause?

At this point, I believe 2K less than I did before... which wasn't alot. 2K should just go bankrupt and be done with it already; and let Firaxis move on with a competent publisher.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yes, let's assume the two biggest pet peeves are the reason animations don't work. It's not like gamespy is in charge of multiplayer and DLC isn't currently usable so neither would have any impact whatsoever on animations. No, it has to be those two things.

 

[lschnarch]

Seriously, what kind of crap is this?

This is just the "community manager's" way of talking. You might translate it to "It's just another thing which we completely messed up".