PhilBowles
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2011
- Messages
- 5,333
If you're asking if I'm linked to the developers or publicity people for the game, I'm afraid (as you suspected, but not for the reason you suspected) I have to disappoint you. I imagine that if I were I'd have signed on and been responding to these kinds of rants for rather longer in the lifetime of this game than a few weeks. Actually, I'm a biologist working with IUCN.
I can of course argue both the assertion that Civ V is "the most simplified version of the franchise" (once again, look back at Civilization in its original form) and (as I have done) that a liking for simplification is any hallmark of intelligence (indeed scientists are normally thought of, accurately in my experience, as being generally intelligent people, and yet one of the guiding principles of science is the principle of parsimony, the idea that the simplest solution that fits the available evidence should be preferred). On the other hand, I think I've now done that several times...
My "fanaticism" isn't with Civ V as a game (I haven't much played it recently actually - possibly because I've been writing endless forum posts about it instead...), it's about combating sloppy thought processes and poor arguments. Back in the days when Usenet was gloriously full of off-topic threads and borderline-insane conspiracy theorists, I used to live there more or less permanently. Recently I've been involved in these kinds of arguments on Starcraft 2 forums, which is actually where I first articulated the difference between strategic complexity and diversity (using Civilization as one example) that I've since mentioned here. Which does naturally tend to prompt me to gravitate towards the contentious and moany threads, which can be high on disatisfaction and denigrating catchphrases (like "dumbing down") but short of logical argument or evidential support.
No doubt I've fallen into the trap of every Devil's advocate by overemphasising, or seeming to, the positive aspects of the subject of everyone else's disdain, but I'm more concerned with ensuring criticism is genuinely constructive if it's intended to be useful or to give the developers an idea what is actually wrong with the game rather than a random set of complaints or objections that may be misdirected. Take the particular bugbear of "dumbing down", a claim I've suggested multiple times doesn't withstand cursory scrutiny. Or the assertion that more varied options make a game inherently more strategically worthy, which can be effectively countered by comparing Go with chess (or chess with most complex games) - two games that differ by orders of magnitude in the options they allow (far more so than Civ V vs. Civ IV), but are very close to each other in terms of their strategic complexity.
I'm not concerned with arguing or "proving" that Civ V is a better game than Civ IV, or even that it's as good. That is, apart from anything else, a value judgment that can't be quantified. And even if I had 100% success rate in convincing people, for example, that Civ V is, in terms of its *strategic* depth (the element that interests me particularly), at least equal to any other Civ game, I doubt that would convince any of those people that it's a 'better' game - they don't like it because it's not as much fun for them, it doesn't have as many options, it just doesn't 'feel' right etc. So if that were the intent it would indeed be a futile exercise.
My concern is just with trimming out the weeds so that the valid concerns can stand. Below, Fallen Angel Lord tells me ICS is a problem in Civ V that it wasn't in Civ IV. I don't have evidence to reject that and am not sufficiently familiar with all levels of play in both games to do so; all I can (and do) say is that I can see theoretical constraints in the design of Civ V that limit ICS, I don't have the information to compare that with the situation in Civ IV (I'm more familiar with the older, ineffective corruption system). On the other hand I *can* categorically reject, say, the claim that city-states add no strategy to Civ V, for reasons I provided in the relevant post. That doesn't inherently mean city-states add great strategic depth to Civilization that wasn't there before, it just means that one argument against them is demonstrably factually incorrect.
Although I noted that Sulla's review prompted me to reassess my conclusions about the effectiveness of happiness as a control on expansion, as I've argued in the past, I remain to be convinced that 'massive ICS' remains an option. It's not just the happiness limit (which can only be controlled up to a point assuming you REALLY mean "massive" - each luxury type can only boost happiness once, happiness buildings cost upkeep etc.), but for other mechanical reasons ICS is less viable than in Civ III and predecessors, even if you want to argue Civ IV. There are fewer tiles in the game overall, oceangoing movement for settlers is slower if you need to colonise anything beyond your starting landmass (and 1upt makes embarked units inherently more vulnerable to attack en route), and the ability to work infinite tiles within the city radius makes it potentially detrimental to settle extra cities within your existing borders, since they'll compete with each other for tile control as their relative culture levels vary. In most games on Continents I rarely have room to actually settle more than five or six cities on my starting landmass, and actually capturing cities is penalised in Civ V, which gives you one huge hit to your happiness resource, to a greater degree than in Civ IV, where you had two individually manageable resources - happiness and maintenance - instead.
However, as per my above to Aristos, my key points in my above posts have been to take issue with specific arguments that don't hold up - the 'dumbed down' thing, the argument for great strategic complexity (vs diversity) in previous games absent from the newer one.
Or such things as the suggestion that using luxuries from city states to control happiness involves no strategy - okay, if the choice, other variables being equal, is between a luxury you don't possess and a copy of a luxury you do possess in order to trade, is that much of a decision? No, not really. But then, other variables being equal, is a choice between Tribalism and Serfdom in Civ IV much of a decision? No, not really. It is, still, strategic decision-making, albeit trivial. If anything I'd argue (and of course have argued) that Civ V offers more real decisions and fewer trivial ones relatively speaking than Civ IV, but even taking a negative attitude to Civ V, I don't see that in any fundamental way it offers fewer meaningful decisions than its predecessor. In the above example, there are at least cases where you might want a tradeable resource over a novel one - if it comes attached to a maritime city-state and the new resource is held by a less valuable militaristic one, for instance, or if the city state offering the tradeable resource is also offering a strategic resource the other isn't. By contrast it's harder to think of situations in Civ IV, other than being completely broke, when you would choose Tribalism over Serfdom.
"Civ V allows ICS to a greater degree than Civ IV". Okay, I'll assume that that's true. Your own earlier point, as I recall, was that the game has been "dumbed down". At least as I understood it, that's not making the same case, so I can happily accept that while my other stands.
As for ICS making these games easy to win, that's surely another issue in itself. It makes them easy to win if you're the one doing it - so is that an issue with the mechanics, or with an AI that tends not to play the game that way and so is easier to beat?
Come to that, is the solution in Civ IV to counter this effect by limiting ICS necessarily the only or best way to deal with the problem? As Sulla's review argues, and I agree, these kinds of games shouldn't force players to choose between several bad options, but should allow you to choose between multiple good options. If we accept that argument, it's not great design to eliminate the ICS problem by making ICS unworkable as a strategy. Surely it's better to try and make 'taller' more viable by comparison with 'wider', so that it is harder for ICS to outcompete development-based strategies?
So allow some form of ICS, but make it less attractive, not by making it economically impossible, but by providing bonuses for taller civs, such as greater rate of social policy increase, quicker access to national wonders etc., bonuses tied to having a large capital (as with some social policies) and at the same time limit the benefits of expansion rather than actively penalise it - for instance by allowing everyone to work all your city tiles, by removing limits on population size per city that force you to invest in extra cities or ill health that accumulates with population size, by giving population fixed bonuses regardless of where they're living (i.e. each pop point creates 2 science regardless of how many cities you have, so you gain as much benefit from having an extra citizen in the capital as from having the same citizen in another city).
This is what I see Civ V at least attempting (and, as I've said often, diplo victory is - again in theory - another example. You now gain as many votes for having one city as for spamming the map). You, and Sulla, may well be right in arguing that it's proven ineffective - I haven't yet played the game at these higher levels, and frankly you can win at 'normal' difficulties with only three or four cities, making development (my favoured playstyle in any case) a fully viable strategy. It's also, having itemised the above, where I fundamentally disagree with Sulla, who sees 1upt as the engine driving this game and its various changes from the ground up - looking at all of the above changes implemented in Civ V, it seems evident that the motivation for a lot of the changes made was to better-balance tall play vs. wide play. And even though wide is still indisputably better, I do think Civ V is the best-balanced of the Civ games between these two options; tall is now viable in a number of circumstances and shooting for certain victory conditions.
In principle I think it's a better approach than Civ IV's, which has an inherent flaw - it tries to nerf city sprawl, but does nothing about the fact that expansion is inherently a much stronger strategy in that game than city development. So you just end up penalising people for playing effective strategies or forcing them to play less effective ones, rather than offering them equally attractive alternatives. This is a point I've made several times in various permutations, if perhaps giving Civ V an overly glowing review (probably because my Civ V experience is still limited, and so I see what it's doing in theory and like it from a strategic perspective, whether or not that necessarily translates to practice at all levels of play).
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Thats a pretty neat catchphrase. I think I'd buy it if it was a leaner (less processor heavy, better AI, less miscilanious poorly implemented concepts, steamless) side game like CivIVCol.
