Anyone remebers Diablo's patch 1.10?, a plea for synergies

[OrsonM]

Anyone remembers patch 1.10 from Diablo 2?, the patch that positively fixed almost every issue within the game.

The state of Diablo 2 on those days was shaky, although there were 7 classes to play with, only 3 were playable (Sorceress, Amazon and Barbarian), the remaining 5 were "interesting" (yet not nearly as easy to play) and the game had degraded into players playing just 3 specific areas of the game (the infamous "secret cow level" being the poster child of this).

In comes Peter Hu, who comes up with the idea that instead of nerfing left and right (like the previous 20 something patches did), he instead left the popular classes pretty much the same, instead buffing the overall skills of the remaining classes and skills in the game, even twitching the popular ones to make them even more fun to play with. To add variety into the game, areas that were boring to play were buffed, and skills that nobody used were retooled under the mechanic of "synergies", which allowed lesser skills buff more powerful skills.

Peter had the right idea at the time, he was a big fan of Diablo 2 and his patch is a love letter to hack and slash. Even today people still play this extremely outdated game and talk of Diablo 2 as post patch 1.10.

If its is possible to fix the game, lets take a page from the book of Peter, and instead of nerfing the things we love (Policies!, ICS!, etc!), buff those we dislike, or hate, or just never use.

Am I being naive?, well, yeah, Peter Hu was fired from Blizzard and the patch was released years after the release of Diablo 2 and Diablo is a completely different game than Civilization V, and the lead designer of Civ 5 resigned/was fired for some reason. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Since Civ 5 policies uses a similar RPG system of skill points, why not take the idea of synergies there?. We all miss the illusion of multiple choices from the old civics system of Civ4 : there seemed to be thousands of combinations, while in reality there were just a few effective combinations for each play style with a few emergency ones for war time, yet the system just felt right, it really felt like the possibilities were endles.

Diablo 2 synergies worked something like the policy system: a Sorceress Firebolt gave the ability Fireball 5% extra damage and 15% extra damage to the ability Meteor (paraphrasing here).

How about one policy, say, Oligarchy (33% extra damage on empire's borders) had a small synergy with, say an unrelated policy from another branch, Military Caste (+1 happiness from garrisoned units) so that having both Oligarchy and Military caste would give a suitable extra bonus for having both skills (+0.2 happiness per unit inside the empire's borders, or anything around those lines as long as it seems as a marriage between both skills). Now imagine pushing these synergies all over different policies. It might be a mess to explain within the game, yet the possibilities might go back to Civ 4 levels (the feeling of being endless). The game already has 50 different policies, if you add synergies you'd have numerous extra ingame effects, not to mention the possibilities of triple synergies. These little effects might give the game an interest spin.

How about buffing less used civilizations (Aztecs, India or Ottoman) and leaving the more popular civs just as they are (China, Greece and Spain apparently). Rise of Nations overnerfed their most popular civilizations once, the result being that nobody played them anymore.

Core game issues could just use a simpler solution from Civ4, hopefully the stack of Doom would make a return only in the way units move, and maybe in the way workers work. 1upt could be more forgiving and just more fun. The same goes with diplomacy and production.

I really like the game, yet it pains me so many good ideas went sour along the way. Maybe when AI and multiplayer issues are fixed then we'll have a different perspective, but at least for now, how about some Peter Hu on the new patch?

thank you for reading, I'm sorry about wording and mispelling, english is not my native language.

 

[Guardian_PL]

Great idea, unfortunately you've used Civ4 comparizons so Civ5 apologists will dismiss your whole post saying that all you want is another Civ4

Moderator Action: Please be a little more civil in your description of those who like the game.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

I've actually started playing Diablo 2 once more today (a bit of a retro feeling, I'm playing Betrayal at Krondor/Antara from GoG as well), and yeah, synergies are making the gameplay much more interesting.

Considering though that devs are unable to do even simple tasks as say fixing the food bar in cities I doubt they will ever be able to undertake such an overwhelming task as introducing synergies. But perhaps modders will pick that up, so all in all - good stuff.

 

[JohnnyW]

I agree that making more fun and effective strategies is better than making them all equally dumb and boring.

 

[AfterShafter]

Great idea, unfortunately you've used Civ4 comparizons so Civ5 apologists will dismiss your whole post saying that all you want is another Civ4

What a great opening note for a nice, thoughtful debate, and not a thinly veiled troll session.

Moderator Action: Please don't suggest that other people are trolling, use the report post button instead.

Anyways, as for the OP, there is a slight problem with Blizzard's approach (or maybe just their implementation) of skill trees in Diablo II, and I think synergies contributed to it in some way. You say pre 1.10 some choices were just "interesting" which I'm assuming you mean as, not really competitive choices - but the fact is, post 1.10, and even to this day, vast, portions of most skill trees are still dead weight. Synergies didn't eliminate said dead weight and make the trees necessarily more diverse, it actually enforced certain skill paths being used and abused time and again, not eliminated them. The game is still defined by a limited set of cookie-cutter combination in Diablo II - synergies didn't solve that. Most classes have 1 or 2 power builds and everything else is "interesting." And simply put, there are still have and have not classes - they all just tend to be more well rounded these days.

What solves bad skills is, simply, better balancing and better thought out trees - making skills/policies useful in themselves, and not primarily as means to ends. Synergies supports the latter (IE - I'll get skill X just to buff skill Y) rather than the former (IE - I'll get skill X because it's awesome!"). The latter makes huge portions of certain skill trees largely instrumental, which Civ V already does too much, and I don't want to see them go down that path further by putting synergies in.

I tend to agree with you concerning one of your major points though - buff things that aren't good rather than nerfing things that are good... But a "buff" that makes a thing's main value that it gives another thing a flat buff, well... It's actually a buff to another skill, and rather promotes repeated uniform skill selection, not diversity of choice and strategy.

In short, I think synergies aren't a terrible idea, but in a lot of ways, they enforce the focus on individual power skills/combos, and not on actual meaningful choices. They should buff skills in themselves, not make them instrumental to other skills. Otherwise we'll see people basically building their whole game around having a super buffed spiritual hammer with everything else being meaningless rungs on the ladder to get to it.

PS - still pissed off they nerfed the crap out of my contervadin when it was a build almost no-one was using from the get go Sir AfterShafter was top 10 on the west coast ladder at one point, and then they killed a skill that wasn't being abused in the first place! Blizzard master balancing my arse...

 

[OrsonM]

What a great opening note for a nice, thoughtful debate, and not a thinly veiled troll session.

Anyways, as for the OP, there is a slight problem with Blizzard's approach (or maybe just their implementation) of skill trees in Diablo II, and I think synergies contributed to it in some way. You say pre 1.10 some choices were just "interesting" which I'm assuming you mean as, not really competitive choices - but the fact is, post 1.10, and even to this day, vast, portions of most skill trees are still dead weight. Synergies didn't eliminate said dead weight and make the trees necessarily more diverse, it actually enforced certain skill paths being used and abused time and again, not eliminated them. The game is still defined by a limited set of cookie-cutter combination in Diablo II - synergies didn't solve that. Most classes have 1 or 2 power builds and everything else is "interesting." And simply put, there are still have and have not classes - they all just tend to be more well rounded these days.

What solves bad skills is, simply, better balancing and better thought out trees - making skills/policies useful in themselves, and not primarily as means to ends. Synergies supports the latter (IE - I'll get skill X just to buff skill Y) rather than the former (IE - I'll get skill X because it's awesome!"). The latter makes huge portions of certain skill trees largely instrumental, which Civ V already does too much, and I don't want to see them go down that path further by putting synergies in.

I tend to agree with you concerning one of your major points though - buff things that aren't good rather than nerfing things that are good... But a "buff" that makes a thing's main value that it gives another thing a flat buff, well... It's actually a buff to another skill, and rather promotes repeated uniform skill selection, not diversity of choice and strategy.

In short, I think synergies aren't a terrible idea, but in a lot of ways, they enforce the focus on individual power skills/combos, and not on actual meaningful choices. They should buff skills in themselves, not make them instrumental to other skills. Otherwise we'll see people basically building their whole game around having a super buffed spiritual hammer with everything else being meaningless rungs on the ladder to get to it.

PS - still pissed off they nerfed the crap out of my contervadin when it was a build almost no-one was using from the get go Sir AfterShafter was top 10 on the west coast ladder at one point, and then they killed a skill that wasn't being abused in the first place! Blizzard master balancing my arse...

This is true, post 1.10 Diablo 2 didn't became a balanced heaven, yet compared to the previous version of Diablo 2, which was 1.09, 1.10 gave players the ability to play with the other classes. Before that it was just Sorceress with Ice Orb, Barbarians with Whirlwind and Amazons with Multi-Missile. It was sad that a game that had over 200 skills only used about a handful. Patch 1.10 gave way for the remaining 5 classes to be actually useful, instead of a niche/masochist experience.

Although, again, you are right in one point: players do find exploits extremely fast, a synergy system wouldn't be foolproof, likely leading to more exploits to fix. Diablo 2 post 1.10 is sadly an example of that, players found exploits fast and soon enough players were back to the same dilemma. Although you wouldn't find a player that would want to go back to the days before synergies.

Yet the idea is there, synergies, even if they could prove exploitable just sound fun enough I think. They really should push for a more RPG aproach on aspects of the game that are already sort of RPG (who knows, might just be fun).

 

[Guardian_PL]

What a great opening note for a nice, thoughtful debate, and not a thinly veiled troll session.

Thank you, maybe now we can actually discuss the OP, and not whether it's relevant because of all that "omg you want another Civ4" bull

You say that synergies in Diablo still didn't solve cookie-cutter patterns, but I beg to differ. If you look at the D2 before 1.10 it's just sad like the OP said.

It's obvious that in any game played competetively in a short time those "power builds" will emerge, even in chess you've got that. But the benefit is that aside from three power builds before, you've got now several more (how many more I don't know since I don't play D2 on a ladder). Thanks to the synergies and their effects some items previously discarded now are surprisingly effective. Sacrifice buffs Zeal - you've got either flat +12% dmg synergy bonus to Zeal for every point put into Sacrifice or you just ignore it and go for Zeal only (some dmg bonus and steady 10% increase to AR). But hey, Fanaticism buffs Sacrifice too! If you've got a life leech to offset HP loss then on bosses Sacrifice is actually better...

All of the above is an "interesting decision". The kind that Civ5 is painfully lacking.

So I'm all for synergy introduction - finally more factors to consider. And besides, we already have social policy skill trees from D2 classic, so why not follow the LoD improvement? xP

 

[AfterShafter]

Thank you, maybe now we can actually discuss the OP, and not whether it's relevant because of all that "omg you want another Civ4" bull

You say that synergies in Diablo still didn't solve cookie-cutter patterns, but I beg to differ. If you look at the D2 before 1.10 it's just sad like the OP said.

It's obvious that in any game played competetively in a short time those "power builds" will emerge, even in chess you've got that. But the benefit is that aside from three power builds before, you've got now several more (how many more I don't know since I don't play D2 on a ladder). Thanks to the synergies and their effects some items previously discarded now are surprisingly effective. Sacrifice buffs Zeal - you've got either flat +12% dmg synergy bonus to Zeal for every point put into Sacrifice or you just ignore it and go for Zeal only (some dmg bonus and steady 10% increase to AR). But hey, Fanaticism buffs Sacrifice too! If you've got a life leech to offset HP loss then on bosses Sacrifice is actually better...

All of the above is an "interesting decision". The kind that Civ5 is painfully lacking.

So I'm all for synergy introduction - finally more factors to consider. And besides, we already have social policy skill trees from D2 classic, so why not follow the LoD improvement? xP

You could have started discussing it right off the bat and left out the trolling. If you set the tone for a bunch of jibes, go figure, that's exactly what you might start.

Moderator Action: Please don't accuse others of trolling, use the report post button instead.

Anyways, I'm not suggesting that synergies aren't interesting and don't add to a tree, but I'm suggesting that I'm not sure they add more than just buffing the skills themselves rather than making them synergies. How many firebolts and blazes, fist of the heavens and holy bolts, and fends and power strikes are there in the game? I'd guess that over half the skills in the game are, in themselves, fun and "useful" for playing through on normal difficulty, and after that, become utterly useless. It's not just lower tier abilities either - garbage like the Paladin's first of the heavens is quite prevalent as well. Welcome to the top of the tree,eh? Now go back to using blessed hammer.

What was Blizzard's answer to this problem? Not to make the skills better and useful in themselves, but to make useless skills give useful buffs to useful skills. End result? A bunch of useless skills that you need to load up on and then summarily forget about as you use the skill they synergize with the good skills. The problem is, synergies promote getting a wider variety of skills, but they don't promote using a wider variety or caring about those extra skills. I mean, I remember making a Hammerdin and maxing out blessed aim for synergy bonuses, and when all was said and done, I had 20 points in a skill I never ever used.

I'm saying that maybe we shouldn't follod the "LoD improvements" because those improvements pretty much wrote off massive portions of the skill trees as things that one would never get and use on their own, and people might dump 20 points into with no intent of ever using the ability. Synergies promote getting useless skills - they don't make a skill like blessed aim useful. On the other hand, if you buff blessed aim itself, you might actually use blessed aim.

Synergies, in my eyes, was Blizzard saying "Well, rebalancing the whole skill tree to make the dozens of useless skills useful would be too large a thing - why don't we just make the useless skills buff the useful ones, then people will have a place to put their points?" I don't want Firaxis to do that with Civ. I want them to, for as many places as they can, make me say "I'm going for THAT skill because I want to make specific use of what it brings to the table" - not "Well, I guess I'll get that because it buffs oligarchy more, and I really love oligarchy."

 

[AfterShafter]

This is true, post 1.10 Diablo 2 didn't became a balanced heaven, yet compared to the previous version of Diablo 2, which was 1.09, 1.10 gave players the ability to play with the other classes. Before that it was just Sorceress with Ice Orb, Barbarians with Whirlwind and Amazons with Multi-Missile. It was sad that a game that had over 200 skills only used about a handful. Patch 1.10 gave way for the remaining 5 classes to be actually useful, instead of a niche/masochist experience.

Although, again, you are right in one point: players do find exploits extremely fast, a synergy system wouldn't be foolproof, likely leading to more exploits to fix. Diablo 2 post 1.10 is sadly an example of that, players found exploits fast and soon enough players were back to the same dilemma. Although you wouldn't find a player that would want to go back to the days before synergies.

Yet the idea is there, synergies, even if they could prove exploitable just sound fun enough I think. They really should push for a more RPG aproach on aspects of the game that are already sort of RPG (who knows, might just be fun).

Well, I still feel they should work on making more policies good in themselves before making then instruments to other skills. I mean, let's face it - through promoting synergies, they probably still have at most 20 to 30 actual offensively useful skills in the late game, with a vast majority of any given tree being utterly useless.

Why can't I make my Convertadin again? Because Blizzard decided, rather than making Conversion useful again after nerfing it, they focused on synergies and left it at that. I always kind of wanted to make a druid focused around the Raven skill too, and with just a few small tweaks to the skill it could have been made offensively viable even in the late game, but instead they focused on synergy and left the useless skills useless, while giving you more avenues to buff the useful ones.

I'm not even so concerned about what you're calling exploits. I'm more concerned about the design philosophy that accompanied synergies - at least for Blizzard. That being, make no effort to make useless skills useful in themselves, and just make them buff already good skills. I do NOT want Firaxis to, this early, take that approach and in doing so resign themselves to having large portions of their policy trees remain underwhelming. Their last patch was a step in the right direction - buff the skills themselves. Let them keep doing that a while, then *maybe* think about synergies once the have-not policies are a bit better.

 

[DaveGold]

The problems in CIV5 aren't really about balancing nations. The problems go right to the core of diplomacy, policies, terrain, units, buildings, combat, economics, empire scaling, era scaling, etc.

Where the original post was correct was that the designers should stop trying to restrain and penalize. The game needs to allow players to do good and rewarding things, not give them frustrating decisions where everything comes at a cost and nothing is as good as it should be.

 

[lolno]

Two points about the D2 synergies:

IIRC they were put in both as part of a general balance change to improve overlooked abilities and also to incorporate logical character progression while leveling up. Most people were hoarding their skill points because many of the earlier abilities weren't worth putting more than one point into. As was mentioned before, after 1.10, a lot of players simply took one narrow synergy path over others, however, so the only real way in which end game balance was improved was not through synergies but through core ability improvements on neglected abilities.

IMO, this could have been avoided in the first place if they had simply built the trees more intuitively. For example a chef learns to how to cut and heat food early on, and they are "simpler", basic skills, but it's not like they stop using them when their skill level advances. Example, it makes little sense that the Sorc class could put 20 points or 20% of her training into Firebolt (a wimpy little ball of fire) and see so little benefit from it. Synergies may have made up for this to some degree, but I think the devs should have made an effort to reduce redundancies in the tree to begin with. Likewise, basic spells like Firebolt could for instance be made to scale more based on the player and the target's stats. So by the time you have cool prestige spells like Hydra, FB wouldn't be totally worthless as presumably you would have better equipment, and your targets more resists, etc.

Synergies in a way went back and put a band-aid on a fundamental balance issue, good band-aid though it was. Ideally, build balance should always give access to the bread and butter skills first (in D2's case basic attacks and masteries), and these skills should be broadly useful in a way that allows for more flexible specialization later on instead of granting flat bonuses to attacks further in the tree. Synergy is one way to do it, allowing early abilities to scale more with general growth (level, stats, equipment) is another.

This type of balance makes the most sense and gives players the most options, IMO. The Civ5 equivalent would be to say allow access to bonus multipliers early (e.g +x gold/food/science whatever per pop etc) and flat bonuses later. Specialist builds would have a good natural synergy and less specialized ones would be more flexible. You wouldn't be "punished" for not following a cookie cutter path.

 

[Isikien]

Nerfing specialists, particularly the library, and lack of multipliers gets my goat.

 

[ICanHasName?]

Buffing weak civs and policies and strategies is the right way to do things, but I'm not sure synergy neccesarily does that ( although its fun and interesting ). Firebolt improving Meteor by 5% doesn't make it a good skill or a useful skill, it makes Firebolt a damage improving accessory to Meteor. It would be identical to system where you could put more points into a skill, but got diminishing returns for doing so.

What about a policy system like the D2 item sets? Filling out a policy tree entirely gives an additional bonus (to prop up the one strangely weak policy that every tree seems to have) and filling out 'allied' policy trees gives you a bigger set bonus. Like having all of Autocracy, Order and Honor gives you the World Domination (tm) bonus of +ABC while Liberty, Freedom and Commerce gives you a Liberal Democracy bonus of +XYZ. That might be simpler then giving every policy useful but balanced synergy with a handful of other policies.

 

[Thander]

Synergies are nice, but I don't think they are needed. Diablo 2 was designed so that later skills would replace lower level skills. Because of this, no one wanted to spend many points in the low level skills. There were a few "unique" low level skills that scaled well in late game, but most of the low level stuff would get replaced. Players would end up just putting the minimum points in those low level skills until they could put points in the high level skills. The synergy system made it so players could gain some late game benefit for putting points in low level skills. Synergies were basically a band-aid to balance out the skills a little bit without needing a lot of development resources. If the game had been designed better in the first place, they would have never needed them.

Civ 5 doesn't really have this problem. Sure, the later social policies generally have more "powerful" effects, but a lot of them are percentage bonuses or they scale with number of cities, units, specialists, city states, etc. An early social policy is still useful late game. Maybe not as much as when you first got it, but it still provides a bonus. Diablo 2 on the other hand had skills like Firebolt that were completely replaced by Fireball when you had access to it.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

Funny, my memories are a bit different... I remember 1.10 as the patch that made Diablo II vastly more moddable.

 

[OrsonM]

What about a policy system like the D2 item sets? Filling out a policy tree entirely gives an additional bonus (to prop up the one strangely weak policy that every tree seems to have) and filling out 'allied' policy trees gives you a bigger set bonus. Like having all of Autocracy, Order and Honor gives you the World Domination (tm) bonus of +ABC while Liberty, Freedom and Commerce gives you a Liberal Democracy bonus of +XYZ. That might be simpler then giving every policy useful but balanced synergy with a handful of other policies.

I actually thought the same thing, but with a twist, how about filling out an entire tree would give you not only a bonus, but also a reputation. Say you fill all of the Honor branch, the result being now you have the reputation of being "honorable". Although it sounds useless, it could have a visible effect in diplomacy (a la Civ 3 and 4 with forms of goverments or civics being favorites and shunned ones). So far I don't think other civilizations care if you fill a full branch of not (or if they do, it just doesnt show).

Buffing weak civs and policies and strategies is the right way to do things, but I'm not sure synergy neccesarily does that ( although its fun and interesting ). Firebolt improving Meteor by 5% doesn't make it a good skill or a useful skill, it makes Firebolt a damage improving accessory to Meteor. It would be identical to system where you could put more points into a skill, but got diminishing returns for doing so.

Synergies for the most part in Diablo 2 worked just like Set items, giving both skills a bonus, sort of a one hand washing the other. Although this didn't really apply as well to Diablo 2, considering skills that just hit one monster were less useful (as a hack and slash, skills that did splash damage were more useful).

To anyone not familiar with the synergy system, the following link would illustrate the idea:

For example, if you maxed just the Sorceress skill meteor the skill would deal the following amount of damage:

Spoiler :

Current Skill Level: 20
10: Fire Damage: 869-927
19: Radius: 4 yards
22: Average Fire Damage: 250-273 per second
1: Mana Cost: 26

Similarly if you just maxed Firebolt, the damage would be laughable in comparison:

Spoiler :

:
Current Skill Level: 20
10: Fire Damage: 45-60
Mana Cost: 2.5

However if the full synergy for Firebolt was completed the damage was exceptional (and if the Sorceress had a +10 to all skills item, which was quite common):

Spoiler :

:
Current Skill Level: 30
10: Fire Damage: 3979-4595 Mana Cost: 2.5

Now for an investment of over 80 points Firebolt became an impressive skill for a extremely small amount of mana, now although meteor for the same amount of skill investment gave over 16k of damage although for 36 mana, it still gave both skills a useful bonus, instead of just being a one sided deal. Theoretically Firebolt could be spammed 3.5 times per second (with maximum casting rate), making the damage of firebolt to something around a damage of 15k per second, while Meteor had a 1.2 second casting delay after being cast, so taking that in consideration, while you waited, you could cast 2 or 3 Firebolts in the meantime (or use them for different purposes, Firebolt could be a better skill against a single monster, while meteor worked better for swarms of monsters). Another thing to consider was that Meteor was a level 30 skill, while Firebolt was a level 1 skill, so before getting the Meteor you could safely spend points in Firebolt and Fireball without worriying you were "wasting" points, which was the main reason players never used those skills to begin with.

If we aply this to social policies, and considering we have 60 social policies to choose, theres bound to be one or two policies nobody ever uses, or branches that nobody bothers to complete. There must be popular policies as well, Monarchy was a fan favorite that got nerfed in an ugly way, when in fact it could have been kept that way but with a synergetic twist:

Monarchy:
-30% cost of purchasing tiles
-Synergies
+0.3 gold per citizen in your capital for each point spent on Liberty
+5% bonus to main skill for each point in Honor or Autocracy

In that way the bonus would have been "kept", but only if you spent heavily in either Honor or Autocracy. The result being that if you spent it all in honor you would get a 60% cost in purchasing tiles or 2 gold per citizen in your capital if you spent heavily in Liberty.

Of course this is all theoretical (and sort of hastly thought), but this would give a different spin to nerfing policies, now if you want that overpowered policy, you are gonna have to invest dearly on it and probably neglect others.

Though it might make France and maybe Greece a bit overpowered, but still, I still think it could be a fun idea.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

I think synergies for policies are a good idea. I hope the developers take note of this somehow.

 

[jprc]

OrsonM has without doubt spent hours and hours playing D2 ! Like I did...
I think we all talk about Diablo 2 + the expansion, not D2 vanilla.

It is an interrestng mixture, D2 ideas ported to Civilization, whatever number: 5 ... or 6 !

As I stopped quickly playing Civ5, I am unsure about synergies, as it seems to me that the skill tree in D2 and the social tree (+ tec tree?) in civ5 are very different in sizes, and not designed for a particular civilization but are generic.
I think synergies are interresting when there are many many options, by instance, in Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II.
HOWEVER, I think it is a great idea if used in a mod, such as Rhye's and Fall (unfortunately i think Fall From Heaven will never be on Civ5).

Talking about Diablo brings me another fear now.
I was sooooooo eagerly waiting for Civ 5, and I was soooo desapointed...
What "killed" me is that I opened the game with pre-conceived ideas (my ideas) of what the game should be, and did not have an open mind. For enjoying a game, better to forget the previous one and keep a fresh open mind...
Now is Diablo 3 going to take the same path as Civ 5? I wait for it soooo much, perhaps too much.
For me, this thread is good as it recalls me that, even if I simply loved a game once, there is no guarranty that the next one can give me the same intense pleasure, skill synergy or not.
Thanks OrsonM.
I should then relax more waiting for Dragon Ages II, Shogun II, Diablo III, Bethesda's next Elder Scroll... and civ6.

 

[skallben]

Nerfing specialists, particularly the library, and lack of multipliers gets my goat.

Yes that was a severly dumb call.

But I agree with the OP design philosophy but sometimes its hard.

Science goes too fast:
Redesign research agreements so they do not stand for 50% of your science production. That would be a nerf but the alternative would mean buffing regular science and making progress even faster. This might however be a bad example as the original design of "free-tech features" such as GSs and RAs probably was such a bad call to start with that it wouldnt be possible to redeem without redesign of the concepts.

 

[OrsonM]

Talking about Diablo brings me another fear now.
I was sooooooo eagerly waiting for Civ 5, and I was soooo desapointed...
What "killed" me is that I opened the game with pre-conceived ideas (my ideas) of what the game should be, and did not have an open mind. For enjoying a game, better to forget the previous one and keep a fresh open mind...
Now is Diablo 3 going to take the same path as Civ 5? I wait for it soooo much, perhaps too much.

But hey, at least the two guys from Arcanum are on Diablo 3, that can't be bad, right?, those guys made a golden game with some spare change, Arcanum was a great game because of that (probably better than the much hyped Fallout series). Which reminds me about yet another RPG game, Arcanum, another game Civ 5 could take a page from.

Trying to stay in topic, lets take on the issue of applying features of novel RPG games into Civ 5, since that was their initial intent with Civ 5, to start fresh.

Science goes too fast:
Redesign research agreements so they do not stand for 50% of your science production. That would be a nerf but the alternative would mean buffing regular science and making progress even faster. This might however be a bad example as the original design of "free-tech features" such as GSs and RAs probably was such a bad call to start with that it wouldnt be possible to redeem without redesign of the concepts.

How many Techs are there in the game in total, lets review each game:

Civ 1: 68 Advances
Civ 2: 89 Technologies (!)
Civ 3: 81 Technologies (originally 82)
Civ 4: 86 Technologies (92 in BTS)

Civ 5 has a total of 73, the second lowest number since (Civ 1 being the lowest)

If we add that it also has 60 policies then the game has something like 132 Advances or skills you can get, but yet it doesnt feel like that at all, mostly because you have 2 different skill sets that get different amounts of experience in time. To put it bluntly, you have 2 different technology trees, and you get to fill them both separately at the same time.

No wonder it feels dumbed down. The number of technologies is about 13 less than Civ 4 vanilla and about 19 less than in bts. The games philosophy seems to point out that they took out several technologies to place them on Social Policies, yet both systems apear to be too separate. How about uniting them in a way.

Arcanum back in it's day had the novel concept that it was 3 different playstyles in one: it was an RPG that combined steam punk, fantasy and non tech-magical skills.

In total the game had a wide array of skills:

Technological skills: 56
Fantasy spells: 70
non Tech-Magical Skills: 16

In total Arcanum had 142 skills that any player could use, plus 8 different stats (strenght, perception, beauty, etc). The process to make leveling up simple and not too cluttered was to allow the player to use 5 points when the game began and then give you one point to use once you leveled up, with the choice of earning 2 points every 5 levels.

But this was a different system, based on merits, you earned those levels and earned your skills, better yet some skills had existing pre-requisites and there were even bonus skills that you could get as quest rewards (you still leveled somewhat fast anyways).

So how come Civ 5 does't use a similar method?, most of the merit on getting your technologies is saving up a bit of gold and getting an RA (since they nerfed Libraries). It's sort of cheesy and you will get technologies faster, when in fact I must admit I like staying on certain eras untill I get some closure that I used some of the periods units or buildings, that I actually enjoyed the game era a bit.

How about delaying leveling up in Civ5 by setting up requirements to each new technological research, maybe you could research the same technology twice or several times and master it (and getting extra bonuses for it), maybe even just allowing you to choose either a technology or a policy one at a time except in exceptional circumstances (like Arcanum did). Maybe there could be a path to certain technologies without researching every technology.

The Aztecs, Mayas and Incas for example did not had the wheel (yet they were able to build roads), they also had limited animal domestication (no use for pack animals on that type of terrain), no horse riding (no horses, mamuts or camels, as hunter gatherers ate them all in the Americas), no gunpowder (wars were quick and short because of a lack of pack animals or wheels) and little or no knowledge of iron working (obsidian was sharper than steel, yet weaker and armors of any type of metal proved useless under the hot weather). Frankly they didn't even need any of those things and they made some advances that matched or surpased those in Europe (Cochineal Dyes, Corn, architecture, astronomy, mathematics). At some point Cochineal dyes was worth more than gold and is hard to find a product within a supermarket that doesnt have at least some chemical made from corn. Corn was and is an extremely useful invention.

However the game doesn't allow for this, I can't skip certain technologies, all civilizations are a mix of a fictional Egyptian-Hellenic-Roman-Medieval-Italian-brittish-American civilization that never really existed (but that popular history is so fond of). There's only one path for all civilizations in all Civ games, and I just wonder, is this even necesary to begin with?.

If I want to head a civ without the Wheel, Bronze/Iron working, Writting, Sailing, Optics, Philosophy, Horseback Riding and Steel, I should be able to. Because History already gave me an example with the Aztecs, and I should be able to skip all those and have Construction, Astronomy and Education without the pesky requirements (and have that educated-monument building-star gazer tyrannical sword slashing empire I always wanted).

Maybe I should be able to retrain in Agriculture and master it like they did or master Construction like the Mayas or Roads like the Incas. Maybe I want to spend more points in social policies (that allow me to keep playing in the same era) than in technologies. But the game penalizes me for this, it just won't allow it. Even though Civilization should be all about role playing past civilizations, to have the whatif aspect to it. Perhaps Social Policies and technologies could be more intertwined, kinda like in Arcanum that allowed Magic and Technology to co-exist within the same leveling system, but that just gave me a little bit at the time at the expense of not getting every single skill and just mastering a few.

Civ 5 at the moment has 132 theoretical advances, yet it gives me those advances twice faster than in other Civ games because it divided them into 2 separate trees.

 

[SuperJay]

Nice OP. I'll agree to the extent that patches should enable systems to work and become useful to the players in at least certain situations, rather than playing whack-a-mole with successful strategies while simultaneously enabling the AI to exploit those strategies with impunity.