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

[Buccaneer]

I have to admit that I have a very strong bias against Civ3, I simply thought it was poor game and mechanics. There were many reasons I felt that way but I recall one of them being that it forced you into playing the way the game designers wanted you to play. If you did that, it worked well. If you decided to deviate, then it fell apart. I cannot recall the details (would have to dig up old Poly posts) but since Jon comes from a Civ3 pedigree, would some of that influence how Civ5 should be played?

 

[tom2050]

For all we know, they might not put in animations for MP, because of DLC. If the vast amount of DLC might cause issues with making MP not work (with animations) against people who don't have the DLC (and those who do). Keeping animations out, they may have come up with a work-around.

Otherwise, Steam is the reason they went with easy MP platform. A tech issue big enough that they might not ever be able to solve it, would be Steam related in some shape or form.

* Civ 5 is nothing like 3 in almost any form... comparing them (gameplay or anything else) is like comparing Civ 4 to the sims.

 

[zonk]

I have to admit that I have a very strong bias against Civ3, I simply thought it was poor game and mechanics. There were many reasons I felt that way but I recall one of them being that it forced you into playing the way the game designers wanted you to play. If you did that, it worked well. If you decided to deviate, then it fell apart. I cannot recall the details (would have to dig up old Poly posts) but since Jon comes from a Civ3 pedigree, would some of that influence how Civ5 should be played?

That might be a big part of it... The biggest thing most hated in III initially is that corruption was just super out-of-control. It was the first attempt to "globally realize" empire-wide effects rather than just confining affects to individual cities.

I fear that Jon saw that and basically thought "right idea, wrong implementation".... Personally, I think it was "wrong idea, worse implementation".

It's not that I don't think there should be ANY empire-wide effects - I just think they should be complementary.

 

[dexters]

I have to admit that I have a very strong bias against Civ3, I simply thought it was poor game and mechanics. There were many reasons I felt that way but I recall one of them being that it forced you into playing the way the game designers wanted you to play. If you did that, it worked well. If you decided to deviate, then it fell apart. I cannot recall the details (would have to dig up old Poly posts) but since Jon comes from a Civ3 pedigree, would some of that influence how Civ5 should be played?

Well Civ4 wouldn't haven been possible without Civ3, functionally and practically as Soren built both and Civ4 took ALOT of mechanics from Civ3 and streamlined them (too much for my tastes). And yes Civ5 appears heavily influenced by Civ3 (but with worse out of the gate AI)

Civ3 to me has the right idea on how to handle AI. Pure sandlot. Give AI low level goals (expand, kill, destroy), add some higher level diplomatic rules and let them go at each other, form alliances and watch the world burn. Keep it simple. no corporations, no religion, no bells and whistles.

The problem I had with civ4 were the SMAC elements, that the AI superficially can handle but in reality is meant only for human consumption.

Religion is one. Ok AI can expand their religions, can benefit gpt from religious cities but honestly, if a AI converts to a religion that is the same as the human players, there's no real benefit to the AI vis a vis interactions with humans and no corresponding relationship bonus from the human side, but the AI is now less likely to attack, much to the human's delight. The same coutesy however is not extended to the AI.

So religion is largely a one way street. entirely manageable and exploitable by humans but something the AI can't handle.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Religion also felt eerily empty in multiplayer. Best you could get is befriending another player and having them give you his religion so you could have happiness. In singleplayer, it was aggressive, in multiplayer, it was painfully passive. Now I don't believe the AI should play like a cuthroat player who needs to wrap this game up in two hours in order to go to dinner. I feel there should be room for relationship building and cooperation. But I also feel these things should be relatively similar regardless of whether you're in singleplayer or multiplayer. Game mechanics for one shouldn't be entirely different for the other.

 

[Bad Brett]

Religion is one. Ok AI can expand their religions, can benefit gpt from religious cities but honestly, if a AI converts to a religion that is the same as the human players, there's no real benefit to the AI vis a vis interactions with humans and no corresponding relationship bonus from the human side, but the AI is now less likely to attack, much to the human's delight. The same coutesy however is not extended to the AI.

So religion is largely a one way street. entirely manageable and exploitable by humans but something the AI can't handle.

But in that case diplomacy is pointless. Civilization isn't just a game of chess, it's about being the ruler of an empire through the history.

For example, let's say you are playing an ice hockey game. You want the AI to do stupid things from time to time, to take some penalties, make some wrong decisions, shoot from the wrong angles. It wouldn't be fun if they did everything right all the time, because it wouldn't feel real.

It's important to include some randomness and personalitites in a game. Just look at all the topics about Monty and Shaka on these forums. Everyone loves to hate them and hates to love them.

In Civ V, if you live next to a really powerful AI, you are pretty much screwed. He won't discuss peace no matter what. In Civ IV, you had options. You could avoid being attacked by using religions and such. This is not an exploit, is a part of the game that was designed that way to make diplomacy more important. For some reason, they decided to remove this.

 

[Janig]

Religion was not removed but rather not concieved. It will be interesting to see the effectiveness of pacts of cooperation and secrecy. Right now they appear to be totally superficial diplomatic agreements akin to religion in civ4.

 

[Buccaneer]

dexters, I agree that Civ3 was truly Civ4's predecessor, which was very different from Civ2. And I agree with the "flavor" add-ons of Civ4 being take it or leave it (I turned off espionage and rarely did corporations). However, there is "something" that makes Civ4 more difficult to play than Civ5. I hope they can find that without forcing us into an even more rigid way of playing. It seems like a lot of what we are doing in Civ5 are "exploits", for the lack of a better term.

 

[dexters]

You mean powerful Empires are reasonable? Xerxes, the king of kings, didn't gain his title by turning the Persian gulf into an iron age European Union.

History is BRUTAL. And the AI has proven it can handle low level goals like growth, expansion and being cold and ruthless towards weaker states. And Civ3 AI had personalities that affected some variables, but they went overboard with Civ4, turning certain AI civs into nothing more than roadbumps. The same issue seem to persist into V, as some Civs will go for culture and be totally defenseless when attacked.

civ3 and V do share the affinity of being more sand-lot oriented. There's equity there. There's no arbitray personality interfering and telling one AI to be a happy runner's up and never plan on winning. In Civ3, if you run debug games and watch the AI play against itself, the winners win because of geography, alliances persisting at the time and luck (strategy not an element as its the same AI working for both sides) but every civ got a shot at winning, some just aren't lucky.

 

[da_Vinci]

In Civ V, if you live next to a really powerful AI, you are pretty much screwed.

What difficulty level are you refereing to here? And do you mean powerful by flavors, or has grown to be powerful over the course of the game? If you mean the latter, then you need to prevent that in the first place.

I am in a game as Rameses on King and Monte is close (but not adjacent) and his Jags and archers were consuming City States, and had take two cities from England. I just built three war chariots and two horsemen, and that force stopped his assault on Almaty and captured Nottingham for me, losing only one war chariot. I think I buried a dozen of his units (archer and jags).

So I am curious as to the conditions that create an unstoppable AI.

dV

 

[The_J]

For all we know, they might not put in animations for MP, because of DLC. If the vast amount of DLC might cause issues with making MP not work (with animations) against people who don't have the DLC (and those who do). Keeping animations out, they may have come up with a work-around.

You might have missed it, but DLC is not MP compatible.
You can't play with Babylon in MP.
Not even the savegames (EVEN without Babylon) are compatible between Deluxe + normal version.

Can't believe i defended this, that i said "they'll make sure that this works". More disappointing is, that Gyathaar already wrote a skript for the savegame compatibility.
They screwed it, one of the biggest concerns of the community, AND it's obviously not rocket science, because someone who's not involved in the developement partially fixed it.
Epic computer engineering fail.

Otherwise, Steam is the reason they went with easy MP platform. A tech issue big enough that they might not ever be able to solve it, would be Steam related in some shape or form.

Ah, now, they can screw it up themselves, they don't need other components for that.

 

[Guardian_PL]

What difficulty level are you refereing to here? And do you mean powerful by flavors, or has grown to be powerful over the course of the game? If you mean the latter, then you need to prevent that in the first place.

I am in a game as Rameses on King and Monte is close (but not adjacent) and his Jags and archers were consuming City States, and had take two cities from England. I just built three war chariots and two horsemen, and that force stopped his assault on Almaty and captured Nottingham for me, losing only one war chariot. I think I buried a dozen of his units (archer and jags).

So I am curious as to the conditions that create an unstoppable AI.
dV

Play on Continents Deity with say Alex that subjugates its entire landmass by 500BC. What you get is "Blanket Of Doom" (seriously PieceOfMind, I'm never get tired to see this). By itself it's not an issue because we all know how efficient the AI is in intercontinental invasions. But if you're on the other end of the same landmass as this monster, all too often you're too slow to stop its 25+ cities from churning unit after unit so for the rest of the game you keep squashing the zergfest that never ends.

You might have missed it, but DLC is not MP compatible.
You can't play with Babylon in MP.
Not even the savegames (EVEN without Babylon) are compatible between Deluxe + normal version.

Can't believe i defended this, that i said "they'll make sure that this works". More disappointing is, that Gyathaar already wrote a skript for the savegame compatibility.
They screwed it, one of the biggest concerns of the community, AND it's obviously not rocket science, because someone who's not involved in the developement partially fixed it.
Epic computer engineering fail.

Ah, now, they can screw it up themselves, they don't need other components for that.

I have no words for that.

 

[Flavorable]

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.

Agreed. That is the golden standard. Civ II had amazing wonder movies.

Civ IV had really crappy wonder movies, and Civ V has something slightly inbetween.

 

[Bad Brett]

What difficulty level are you refereing to here? And do you mean powerful by flavors, or has grown to be powerful over the course of the game? If you mean the latter, then you need to prevent that in the first place.

Deity of course. I find it pointless to even try any other level in this game.

Of course you often can often easily defend your borders against a powerful AI, but the catch is that he will never discuss peace with you as long. In earlier versions of Civ, and especially Civ 4, wars were really expensive. If you couldn't penetrate your enemy's defense for 10 turns, your people would get really angry and the cost of the troops would hurt your income, which could lead to that you fell behind in the tech race. Therefore it was always advisable to make peace if a war wasn't going anywhere.

In Civ 5, these penalties don't exist. The AI work like this: "Okay, the player has 10 units, I have 30 units, good, I will eventually win the war so I shouldn't discuss peace". The result is that I often find myself in constant war with two or three AI's, which isn't fun at all, even though it's quite easy to trick them into my traps.

The big difference is between Civ 5 and earlier games is that Civ 5 focuses much more on the actual battles and much less on the planning. Even though the SoD itself didn't need very much thought, there were big decisions to be made before the war. The question wasn't just "Will I be able to destroy the AI", the question was "Will I be able to defeat the AI in an acceptable amount of time". When I began playing Civ 4, some of the wars I declared really ruined my game even though I was stronger than the AI, because war was more a matter of economy than battle strategy.

And this is the difference. Shafer wanted to do the battles more fun be removing war weariness and such. But the result is often that you fight until one gives up. And this is not fun.

 

[charon2112]

The AI work like this: "Okay, the player have 10 units, I have 30 units, good, I will eventually win the war so I shouldn't discuss peace".

How do you know this for sure? Were there developer notes?

 

[Guardian_PL]

How do you know this for sure? Were there developer notes?

And how do you that this isn't the case "for sure"? Have you got developer's notes? Because from my experience what Bad Brett just said looks exactly right - until you'll have more units than the AI there's no peace. How does that work in your opinion/experience?

 

[Fistalis]

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."

OMG basically translated this = We made design decisions that prevent animations in multiplayer get over it.

I'm really starting to think we're watching firaxis and civs fall from grace

 

[charon2112]

And how do you that this isn't the case "for sure"? Have you got developer's notes?

The burden of proof is on the person making the initial statement.

 

[Thormodr]

I have to admit that I have a very strong bias against Civ3, I simply thought it was poor game and mechanics. There were many reasons I felt that way but I recall one of them being that it forced you into playing the way the game designers wanted you to play. If you did that, it worked well. If you decided to deviate, then it fell apart. I cannot recall the details (would have to dig up old Poly posts) but since Jon comes from a Civ3 pedigree, would some of that influence how Civ5 should be played?

I had been thinking the same thing. ciV = Civ III

I agree 100% I have always thought Civ III was by far and away the worst Civ. Ironically enough, as you said, it was JS's favourite.

With ciV, you can see that connection now, you are 100% correct.

 

[polypheus]

I had been thinking the same thing. ciV = Civ III

I agree 100% I have always thought Civ III was by far and away the worst Civ. Ironically enough, as you said, it was JS's favourite.

With ciV, you can see that connection now, you are 100% correct.

I have to completely disagree with this. Civ3 introduced culture and strategic resources and national gold support for armies amongst other things. It was the best Civ of its time by far. How people can think Civ3 is worse than Civ1 and 2 I'll never understand.