So, where is a better place for discussion of what Civ 4 offers over all the others of the series?
Nah this is the place for those people who have seen the light, appreciate a truly great game and aren't taken in by the piffle that passes for entertainment these daysThis thread is reserved for people who are perfectly happy playing other iterations of Civ and don't play Civ 5 yet still find the need to complain about it years after the fact for some reason using hyperbolic, myopic, outdated arguments.
I am not convinced that 64 vs 32 bit is the bottle neck.
It most certainly is. Why do you think there are no humongous maps in Civilization 5? Why do you think Jon Shafer extolled the beauty of his personal 2 city civilization? 32 bit is way too limiting. 64 bit takes the shackles off.
I would guess they are focused more on iOS than anything else. But hey, iOS is 64 bit! My prediction is that VI is simplified V to accommodate touch. What you are hoping for might have to wait for Civ VII! But I am not clear what you are looking for...
I agree with you here. They'll likely focus on touch which will further "dumb down" things to accommodate that. What I am looking for is a quality iteration of the Civilization series and they need 64 bit in order to do that.
It is the minority who would characterize Civ5 as a disaster. If nothing else, it sold extremely well. From the mod perspective, “disaster” is not hyperbolic, but otherwise I think you would be well served by being able to better articulate your disappointment. But hey, this is a rant thread, and you are entitled to your opinion.
Civilization 5 sold well because it is a Steam exclusive. Civilization 5 pissed off a lot of long time fans of the series who invested a lot of money over the years. I've been buying Civ products since 1992 and bought every Civ product up until the first expansion for Civilization 5. It was a disaster for long time fans. For casuals, I suppose it was a boon.
And if you are talking mods, Civilization 5 utterly pales in comparison to cIV. Not even close.
Yes, I am entitled to tell people why Civilization 5 is a terrible game. This is the designated place to do it. If you think this is the place to defend Civilization 5, you are incorrect.
I think “better” encompasses weak features when they are missing in the alternative.
So, where is a better place for discussion of what Civ 4 offers over all the others of the series?
“If I know that my game is going to support 32-bit, some people are going to play my game in 32-bit mode. I know that I can’t design more stuff in my world, no more can be accessed at once than what fits on a 32-bit amount of memory, which is about two gigs. ....You can never go outside of those boundaries,” Paxton says.
The issue is that 32-bit systems are out of memory addresses. In order to use physical memory, a program needs to be able refer to different slots on the RAM. A 32-bit system only has 2^32 addresses that it can use, which translates to roughly 4GB of memory.
“A simple analogy would be phone numbers,” writes Soren Johnson, whose new Mohawk Games studio is working with Oxide. His game, codenamed Mars, will be the first studio outside Stardock to license the engine for use.
“With seven digits, only 10 million phones numbers are possible. Add three more digits with area codes and now 10 billion numbers are possible. 32- vs 64-bit is similar, but more extreme. ...With 64 bits, it's so much higher, I can't do the math in my head. If your game needs more than 4GB of active memory, 64-bit is the only option without paging to your hard drive or some other (slow) caching method.”
“Now being able to say ‘Listen, we’re not running on 32-bit anymore at all’ means that I can design a game that uses more than 2 gigs of memory. Suddenly ...we don’t have to worry about universe size because we may go above the 2GB limit. We don’t have to worry about modders creating new ships, we don’t have to worry about the amount of detail on all the ships, and all of the planets and all those assets that we have in the game, because we can go beyond those boundaries. We can design for the game we want, rather than trying to fit inside a box that feels like its shrinking year on year.”
I've been buying Civ products since 1992 and bought every Civ product up until the first expansion for Civilization 5.
Are you saying that you never bought the first expansion for Civ V? Because if so, then we are talking about two different things here...Civ 5: Brave New World is 10x better than vanilla.
It most certainly is. Why do you think there are no humongous maps in Civilization 5? Why do you think Jon Shafer extolled the beauty of his personal 2 city civilization? 32 bit is way too limiting. 64 bit takes the shackles off... So, if they want a truly great game they need 64 bit. If they want to limit themselves then by all means keep the antiquated 32 bit. I do hope Firaxis has the vision and ambition to make the right decision.
Well, I like to role play in my games. The AI is supposed to assist and compliment that role playing experience. It is essential for me, anyway.
What I am looking for is a quality iteration of the Civilization series and they need 64 bit in order to do that.
Civilization 5 sold well because it is a Steam exclusive.
Civilization 5 pissed off a lot of long time fans of the series who invested a lot of money over the years.
I've been buying Civ products since 1992 and bought every Civ product up until the first expansion for Civilization 5. It was a disaster for long time fans.
For casuals, I suppose it was a boon.
Yes, I am entitled to tell people why Civilization 5 is a terrible game.
This is the designated place to do it.
If you think this is the place to defend Civilization 5, you are incorrect.
*snip*
Agreed. I have heard you assert that V is terrible, I have not heard you say why. (Okay, aside from that the maps are too small.)
*snip*
Anyway, Derek Paxton (aka Kael) knows what he's talking about as far as game design and modding. Fall from Heaven is a masterpiece. Anything like that being made for Civilization 5, perchance?
Here he talks about 64 bit:
http://www.pcgamesn.com/stardocks-derek-paxton-explains-how-new-64-bit-engine-can-revitalize-strategy-gaming
Thats a great article, really. However I don't agree with this statement: “It isn’t that the SimCity devs aren’t good at their jobs,” Paxton says. “They are probably some of the best in their field.” But fidelity and performance are approaching a crisis point for strategy games that aspire to high production values.
I believe that SimCity 4 was much more complicated when it came to actually building and managing your city. And had MUCH larger maps. While the SimCity 5 devs might be very good ( I wouldn't deny that) they have simply chosen a game engine that sucks (imo) for a city building game like SimCity (If I had to rage about it the tiny city sizes would be the single most damaging gameplay feature to SimCity 5). Almost no matter how awesome and genius your devs is a bad engine is practically a dead end that cannot be overcome. It requires the construction of a completely new engine. This is not unlike CiV in my opinion.
Beach says that if there's anything left over that he might have wanted to include in Civ V, after a full game and two expansions, it would be the ability to zoom out to reveal a globe-shaped world (a feature lost when Civ moved to a custom game engine) and the ability to terraform. The original design for the Dutch civ called for them to be able to reclaim land from the sea, but this proved to be impossible within Civ V's existing game engine.
"That's a little tip of the iceberg for what was left here. There are so many places to go," Beach says, hinting, perhaps, at what fans might be able to expect from an as yet unannounced (or even acknowledged) Civ 6.
As for Civ 5, Firaxis is confident that, after seven full years, it's put the game to bed as finally and completely as it could have.
"If you look at Civ 4, it's still getting played ... Civ 3 is still getting played. It's a model that makes sense," Beach says. "Part of the strength of the community is the way that, even once we wrap up working on one, they know it's going to have been brought forward over many years of gestation, and it's going to be in a really solid place.
"[Fans are] going to be happy sitting with [Civ 5] for a couple of years until the next one is ready to roll out."
The foremost is Diplomacy. It needs to be improved much more. To borrow some ideas from Paradox's games.
Not to penalize Warmongers so much.
when they made a jump from CIV IV to V the map size stayed the same
The Huns are literally the opposite of a civilization. I don't understand why they're in.
I mean, bringing out relative nobodies like Sweden, Venice or Brazil is one thing, but the Huns didn't even have cities.
(I'm kinda of eager to try out 1UPT, though. Sick of gigantic stacks swatting my dudes aside like freakin' Godzilla.)
Great article, thanks! You really have me looking forward to 64 bit. I really have to wonder how that will work out for us with the commercial tension to make the game work with touch on iPads.
The bits at the end, right after the part you quote, are very telling. I am not sure why some folks keep hoping for another expansion. Emphasis added:
With 32-bit theres a total of 4GB addressable memory. That includes graphics card and what have you. That is why you hear some people saying that you only really get 3GB of memory. The graphics card eats up part of the addressable memory.
Limit for 64-bit:
2^64 = 18.446.744.073.709.551.616
18.446.744.073.709.551.616 / (1.024 x 1.024) = 16EB
Windows doesn't have a version that supports 16 exabytes of addressable memory, nor do I think that you could even fit that much into a computer physically at the present time.
With mods and crazy big maps, 64bit is most welcome!