That is no argument. Of course no game is completely realistic. The point is Civ IV is somewhat realistic in ways that I find interesting. In Civ V that is gone. I mentioned some examples where Civ IV fares much better than Civ V.
My point is that a game isn't worse or 'dumbed down' by default because it's less realistic than another. You happen to prefer more realistic elements of Civ IV, it appears - personally I found the best elements of Civ IV (culture, religion) were the very aspects that weren't very realistic (as I say, to me the best part of that game was the territory- and sometimes city-stealing 'culture war' that has no analogue in reality), or weren't handled realistically (yet again, developing polytheism etc. and being unable to use religious buildings or bonuses), and if anything the most realistic aspects of Civ IV were the same features that were realistic in earlier versions - Civ IV added no realism that I recall.
Again my point is Civ IV does most of this better than Civ V. That no game is completely realistic is irelevant.
And you could argue that Civ III did most of it better than Civ IV. To take a random example, the age-old Civ convention of having the Great Library provide technologies that were known to other civs is a very good representation of its historical reputation as a storehouse of the greatest knowledge of the age. Having it generate extra scientists is at best more of an abstraction.
Neither do I, but war is still an interesting part. And don't tell me that a victory condition which requires that capitals cannot be destroyed is better than one requiring the anihilation of a civilization.
I won't, which is why I didn't say I think Civ V handles conquest victories better... I do however favour the diplomatic victory system that actually forces you to engage in diplomacy rather than spamming the map with cities and conquering neighbours to get a majority vote through sheer population. And the culture victory is interestingly novel.
Again civilizations have been destroyed.
Civilizations can be destroyed in this game - they just have to have their capital change hands. Alexander will just be disappointed when he gets to Persepolis in Civ V, that's all...
I agree that it's conceptually awkward, but I've been playing a game for two decades in which individual named rulers run their nations for 5,000 years; some incarnations even gave them specific personality traits emphasising that yes, these are intended to be the historical figures themselves, rather than an abstraction to avoid changing a graphic every few turns - I think I can handle lack of realism in the name of playability.
And armies don't walk up to a capital and - puff - by magic they cannot burn it down or bomb it to ruins with nuclear weapons.
Any game is necessarily an abstraction - if it makes you feel better about it you can always bear in mind that, historically, civilizations have been very reluctant to let their capital die, if only for sentimental (although often also for logistical) reasons - many of the world's older capitals of surviving nations, from London to Rome, have burned down or been destroyed at one time or another. Most get rebuilt in the same spot. A city in Civ V that can't be destroyed might conceptually be seen as a case like that. Many other cities have also been rebuilt, and yet in Civ in any incarnation if a city is destroyed, it's gone for good - I'm not sure that's necessarily any more realistic, even though it's more intuitive.
EDIT: One of the nice changes in Civ V is the introduction of a 'repair improvement' mechanic. I wonder if there could be a 'rebuild city' mechanic along similar lines? A city that gets razed is left as ruins, and a settler can opt to rebuild on the same spot - restoring the Wonders in that city, but restarting it from pop 1 and having to rebuild some or all of the buildings (this could be worked the same way earlier Civ games handled 'battle damage' in cities - a random number of structures will have survived). Among other things, this would let them drop the 'capitals can't be destroyed' rule.
After all, it's curious that ancient ruins in Civ V seem to stick around but recent ruins are less durable... Incidentally, this pointless name/graphic change is a minor gripe; tribal villages made so much more sense as an idea than 'Ancient Ruins', especially when you're conceptually starting the first civilizations around when you play the game, only to run across countless stone ruins everywhere you go.
You are right in that most people don't want to play a game that lasts 10+ hours. At least again and again for years on end. Most people also don't want a game that might need months of gametime before just getting the hang of most parts. So no Civ-games have not typically been for the masses.
Okay, you caught me in an inconsistency in my argument - however in my defence I'd point out that all computer games took a lot more patience back in 1990 and even for some time afterwards; these days I don't have the patience to get through a campaign mission of Starcraft 1, for example. For the time Civ's game scale wasn't as demanding as it is now; as time has gone on it's become moreso because it's much more limited than, say, the Starcraft franchise in how far you can accelerate gameplay - and Firaxis has responded to that by making the version of the game you insist is aimed at more of a mass audience than its multimillion-selling predecessors take *longer* to complete.
But whatever the true justification, you can't argue with success - Civilization *is* a game that has consistenly had mass appeal and the success to prove it. It sold millions of copies in an era when most games were selling thousands - it still ranks among the best-selling computer game franchises in history. You don't, as Firaxis is now doing, try to import a brand name into everything from console games to Facebook games and MMOs unless that brand name is a proven commercial success. Blizzard could have named their MMO World of Diablo (since that's the game engine) or given it an all-new name - but they went with a name that capitalised on the already great success of their Warcraft brand, not to make an obscure little game called Warcraft more successful.
And I agree with someone else who wrote, that social policies are two restrictive. No real nation (sorry, reality intrudes once more) are restricted like that.
Civilization IV had a mechanic about which the same can be said - leader personalities. No real nation is restricted to one pair of 'personality traits' over the course of millennia. Yet these are one of the key features of that game people are clamouring to bring back.
I think it would be fine to make the policy branches adjustable, and it would be very simple to do - just remove the restriction on changing policy branches (i.e. that if you drop one you have to research it all over again) and let the player select X of his available policy branches at any one time (either a fixed number throughout the game, or a number contingent on specific technologies) - with individual policies in each branch remaining fixed as now.
No, no, no! Have you played Civ IV or the earlier titles? They where complex enough that many people don't wanted them.
Since 1990 - however the sales figures simply don't support your case. Wikipedia gives a figure of over 6 million Civ games sold - and with four previous incarnations, if that many people were being put off the sales would surely not have remained as high as needed to reach that figure and spawn further sequels once people knew what they were getting into. I've heard of more people abandoning Starcraft 2 for being complex with a steep learning curve than I have people abandoning Civilization.
The learning curve was too steep and moreover too long. I have never seen a consolegame of matching eras with a matching complex gameplay.
And while I've never played it (not having a console), from what I know of the latter I'm sure exactly the same can be said if you compare Civilization V with Civilization Revolution.
Civ V has been simplified on many points (the main exceptions being city states and social policies, but city states ended up ruining some of the balance - and else they don't do much, and social policies I have mentioned before).
City states are I think much like corporations or religion in Civ IV - a very good addition to the game conceptually, but one which needs a lot of tweaking to work. And you really can't argue with a straight face that the religion mechanic - which restricted religious benefits, spread into other civs not withstanding, to at most 5 of 7 civs in an average game, and which gave huge bonuses and unlocked key early-game buildings - didn't "ruin some of the balance". I had too many games of Civ IV which boiled down to "get religion early enough = win the game". I'm not aware of balance issues with city-states that are even close to being that dominating.
For ex.:
The terrain in Civ V is just about as boring as possible - and no I don't mean the graphics. It doesn't matter much where you put your cities.
The lousy diplomacy means it doesn't matter what you do or don't do to or with your opponents.
The stupid AI means that you can fight off China, USA and the Martians with three riflemen and a slingshot, so war is a doddle.
That is dumbing down.
All but point 1 are a symptom of dumb AI and don't really relate to the actual game mechanics - I doubt anyone would argue that the AI doesn't need fixing. Then again, in Civ IV it was deemed so poor it actually *was* fixed - maybe that will happen with Civ V. In my last Civ V game, at least in the later stages when the AI seemed to get a better hang of what was going on, it seemed to play much like the earlier Civ games I'm used to.
I'm not sure without refreshing my memory what exactly has been done to change terrain - although high ground granting/blocking line of sight and using rivers as barriers to attackers are new as far as I can remember, which don't seem cases of simplification. Main gripe in that regard would be loss of the irrigation mechanic; I now seem able to build farms anywhere whatever my tech level.
There is a huge lack of options in Civ V. Life in Civ V is simply not interesting enough.
If anything I felt Civ IV was getting overly bloated, with too many units that were much the same as one another (axemen vs. swordsmen for example), often short-lived in the tech tree, and quite often redundant. It was heading too far towards detail for the sake of detail.
That's what they have done to Civ. Make it a more casual game, so 5 times as many people buy it. They might only play it for a fifth of the time - combined, but the seller has 5 times as much money and laughs all the way to the bank.
Now, that is not illegal. I think it is typical of the world today and I think it is sad that quality is sneered at, but so it is. My life is more than civ. I am a big guy, I can take it
. But don't tell me Civ V is the better game if you want complex and somewhat (I said somewhat) realistic gameplay.
I won't. But I also won't tell people that by virtue of having less extraneous detail and fewer complexities, and by being less of a simulation (even with the proviso 'somewhat', 'realistic' is an arguable point in favour of either game), Civ V is inherently a 'dumber' game than Civ IV, or one targeted at a mass market - I might as well argue that Company of Heroes is necessarily a better game than chess on the same basis. And I still don't see an argument for supposing that Civ V is targeting a mass market audience - across genres and game systems mass market audiences *like* detail, lots of unit options, and developed combat systems, the very things people are complaining Civ V has done away with. Shoot-em-ups have more mass market appeal than RTSes, Dungeons & Dragons more than the Traveller series of RPGs, Axis & Allies more than Tigris & Euphrates, and so on and so forth. Which is why I say that many of the arguments pitched against Civ V here sound as though they're coming from the stereotype masses themselves.
Phil
![[offtopic]](/images/smilies/offtopic.gif "Offtopic [offtopic]")
