Trav'ling Canuck
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2018
- Messages
- 2,959
I think part of the reason why some of the features may seem "bleh" in design and execution (like the VI version of great works) is that they spread themselves a bit thin in trying to include so many features in the initial release, but I'm not sure that's the problem with the AI.
There's definitely been an effort to carry forward all of the features from Civ 5 into the new game. I hope they drop that mindset for Civ 7.
Sometimes a particular feature becomes the sole domain of a single programmer, who may have really obtuse and poorly documented code that nobody else can read, and sometimes it can be hard to get him to fix a problem (especially if he has been reassigned to a different project, or left the company entirely). Some of the vanilla bugs had this kind of feel to them -- like the bug in the production menu where it would sometimes show the wrong "just completed" item, which took them like two or three patches to finally fix. That kind of thing smacks of working on someone else's code that you don't really know very well (and which probably wasn't very well-written to begin with).
The whole aircraft feature set has this feel. Lots of expanded options compared to Civ 5 that suggest a lot of ambition for this area, but then not followed through on, notably with respect to making the feature set work with carriers or be handled well by the AI.