Any chance of a classic retail version with a manual?

[bite]

Will there be a retail release, more than definitely, a manual in the box, probably not

 

[Verrucosus]

There's no doubt that the civilopedia is very helpful. If it were not, the lack of a printed manual would be even more inconvenient. Lots of other games with digital manuals make you to tab out of the game whenever you want to look something up. So, yes, things could be worse, but I'm afraid I'm a spoiled Civ player who enjoyed the luxury of a printed manual on top of a civilopedia for four versions (not counting Colonizopedia, Datalinks and Piratopedia). More importantly, there are strange people who actually read the manual from cover to cover when they are away from the game and their fondness of reading about something they love seems no least legitimate than other people's appreciation of action figures.

In my opinion, Quintillus' criticism of icon-heavy applications is spot on. Does anyone remember the release version of the Civ4 civilopedia? It used icons on its index pages, so if you wanted to read about a certain tech you first had to find the correct icon first. The icons had tool tips and were arranged alphabetically , but it was a still mind-boggling choice. I believe they changed it with the very first patch. Civ4 also uses only icons with tool tips for the city build options on the city screen; a text menu of build options is available from the main map, but on that screen you don't see all the relevant city details.

Anyway, a game that celebrates the history of Civilisation should not be too cheap to make use of the alphabet and the printing press.

 

[Inspector Javert]

I admit I still do miss the thrill of opening the box and finding everything that's been put int here (hell I think that's half the appeal of lootcrate) but this a new age. At least I'll be able to tell my great nieces and nephews about how cool old computer games used to be before they had their fancy pass "octopus gift" systems...

 

[joncnunn]

Will there be a retail release, more than definitely, a manual in the box, probably not

With the edition with a box only weighing 4 ounces (see Amazon's pre-order page for Civ 6), it's all but confirmed that a full manual hasn't been printed out.
It's still possible that one has been made and will be in a pdf file, which was the case in both Civ V & BE.

 

[Quintillus]

With the edition with a box only weighing 4 ounces (see Amazon's pre-order page for Civ 6), it's all but confirmed that a full manual hasn't been printed out.
It's still possible that one has been made and will be in a pdf file, which was the case in both Civ V & BE.

So there is one. And it's substantial, too, at over 300 pages for Civ5. It seems like it would make sense, if they already are going to the effort of creating it, to make it available for order on-demand if nothing else. For preorders they could allow ordering up till, say, a month before release, and then order however many copies were ordered, while there's on-demand book printing nowadays for lower-volume books that would work after release, albeit at a somewhat higher per-item cost. Seems like it would be win-win - those who want a paper copy could get one, and Firaxis would recover some of the cost of writing the manual.

 

[bite]

With the edition with a box only weighing 4 ounces (see Amazon's pre-order page for Civ 6), it's all but confirmed that a full manual hasn't been printed out.
It's still possible that one has been made and will be in a pdf file, which was the case in both Civ V & BE.

Indeed, though since I doubt Civ 6 has gone into physical production yet, that number is probably a place holder

 

[jmknpk]

My main nitpick with the Civ5 one is the section headers just have icons with no text, which makes it difficult to quickly jump to a topic (such as Wonders) if you don't know what the icon is... and they aren't all obvious. That's actually a complaint I have with several other applications as well, a good example being GMail where they've moved away from text-and-icons to just icons

I finally have the Civilopedia icons memorized. In general, in the industry, most icons have hover text to explain their purpose or function. What annoys me the most is the timing and seemingly nonexistent lack of control in explicitly requesting the hover text. Some apps seem to require me to leave my curse on the icon for 10 seconds before I see the hover text explaining an icon. There are many apps where I get the hover text when I don't want it (because I already fully understand the icon). The hover text sometimes comes in an annoying opaque box which obscures items I want to see. Then some of the hover text or info will not go away with out noticeable effort. I currently get some hover icon offering formatting options I never want, which is placed directly over the MS Excel cell I am working with, completely obscuring the contents. Some day I might waste time figuring out how to disable that annoying feature in the settings. Civ 5 is not too bad on the time delay for hover text and has never annoyed me much.

Do those exist?

Maybe not yet. Perhaps we could make millions on the concept. Interested in some penny stocks to cover R&D?. <just kidding> Lol

 

[jmknpk]

One of the problems with paper manuals, in general, was regarding updates. Often, a very thick paper manual was extremely useful for complicated apps. But it almost immediately became obsolete as beta test feedback came to fruition in a series of quick updates. Then I had a paper manual, with a bunch of subsequent feature lists, changes, readme.txt updates, and other sources to get the complete (and up to date) reference manual, which often never existed entirely in paper form.

The wonderful thing about the Civilopedia, is that all DLC, upgrades, expansions, and even user mod documentation, is immediately available in-game in an interactive format. The version of the Civilopedia I am viewing is always completely compatible and consistent with the version of the game I am playing (including mods). At least if no errors were introduced or information omitted (which happens only rarely in my Civ world).

 

[jmknpk]

CFC does have some really useful, accurate information on the Civ games. And for the more in-depth stuff, I've often found that I can find it as quickly on CFC as anywhere.

Agreed. Civilization Fanatics Center is an extremely rare and unique gaming forum, IMHO, which probably does things better than most official game site forms.

I typically totally ignore Steam forums about a particular game, unless I can find no other source for a certain topic. I would think things might trend in a better direction on their forums, but seems to currently be used by novices.

 

[Quintillus]

Agreed. Civilization Fanatics Center is an extremely rare and unique gaming forum, IMHO, which probably does things better than most official game site forms.

I typically totally ignore Steam forums about a particular game, unless I can find no other source for a certain topic. I would think things might trend in a better direction on their forums, but seems to currently be used by novices.

One thing I really like about CFC is things stick around. I've seen links to the official Firaxis Civ5 forums from CFC, and received an HTTP 404: Not Found error when following the link. With CFC, what was written in 2001 is still here, and if you need it, you can still find it. Might take a bit of browsing of a few searches, but it's still there and discoverable if you're determined enough.

CFC also does a really good job of making things searchable/browseable. Steam forums are essentially just a few stickies plus topics in most-recently-posted order. Which is fine if you're there for the latest buzz, but not great if you are looking for in-depth info about a particular topic, which may not have been posted about for months, or longer. Google can help sometimes, but it's not as good as CFC's Advanced Search, where you can limit your search by forum, poster, thread name, or thread contents - I've found that invaluable for Creation & Customization topics. And the Downloads Database is pretty handy, too. IMO, it's more granular than Steam Workshop, in part because it's specific to particular games rather than more general categories. In short, Steam forums are fine for general/recent info, but for game-specific, in-depth info, the advanced features of CFC do make a real difference. And I agree, what's been built up here over years isn't easy to equal in official forums, especially since a lot of those are only maintained while the game in question is selling well.

I do wonder what the impact of Firaxis/Steam forums for future Civ versions will be. Civ5 traffic has not been as robust as Civ4 traffic, and I suspect Steam forums/Firaxis forums are part of that reason. It's not so much CFC fading into oblivion that I'm concerned about either, so much as the epicenter of a future version moving to Firaxis forums/Steam forums or workshop. To some degree, the Workshop has already done that with Civ5. And while I absolutely agree it's very convenient - even more so for games with multiplayer servers where maps can be automatically downloaded from the workshop - I do have some reservations about whether that will impact the kind of large-scale, epic mods and total conversions we've seen for Civ3 through Civ5.