Civilization "Depth" - A Civ 4 vs. Civ 5 Comparison

[jbevermore]

It is true that they are more "different" than Civ teams, but I don't think that the only way you can get that is by handing out negatives. What if Morgan had say, +4 Economy and +0 Environment (or whatever the attributes were called, can't remember), and the Gaians had +4 Environment and +0 economy, instead of -2/+2? You'd of course have to balance out with the other "civs," but the point is that you could do the same thing without handing out penalties.

They could give the current civs more extreme abilities if they wanted, but maybe they felt that those fit more in a scifi environment than in one that is historically-based.

I'm neither for nor against penalties, but I think that it's silly to say that a game that uses more penalties is more "complex," emphasis on the quotation marks.

EDIT: taking away the negative modifiers in the example above also doesn't mean that there aren't negative consequences in taking one of those factions over the other. The same, very real, choices are still there.

If you take away the negatives, it's just an opportunity cost like TMIT was saying. Part of what was interesting was those negatives, sure going all out on econ could make you crazy amounts of money but you risk an environmental meltdown if you push to hard (again for those that haven't played AC, +2 ECON meant +1 money on EVERY TILE throughout your empire. Bad environmental penalties meant randomly spawning hostile units). So the bonuses could be huge, but the penalties could be equally bad.

I'm not suggesting that Civ should just mimic what AC did, I'm simply making the case that negative modifiers (carefully used) are not a penalty to fun. Far from it, when done right they can really make those "interesting choices" that Sid Meier talks about interesting.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

If you take away the negatives, it's just an opportunity cost like TMIT was saying. Part of what was interesting was those negatives, sure going all out on econ could make you crazy amounts of money but you risk an environmental meltdown if you push to hard (again for those that haven't played AC, +2 ECON meant +1 money on EVERY TILE throughout your empire. Bad environmental penalties meant randomly spawning hostile units). So the bonuses could be huge, but the penalties could be equally bad.

I'm not suggesting that Civ should just mimic what AC did, I'm simply making the case that negative modifiers (carefully used) are not a penalty to fun. Far from it, when done right they can really make those "interesting choices" that Sid Meier talks about interesting.

True, I don't think it hurt the fun either. But you could produce the same game results and the same game decisions by re-wording the game rules without using negatives. What if the baseline enviroment state was total environmental meltdown, with everyone but Morgan getting some small bonus? Same end result, same decisions to be made, no negative modifiers.

I don't think a negative makes the game less fun, but I also don't think NOT using them makes it less "deep." That's all illusion and how the gamemakers word the mechanics.

 

[jbevermore]

Haha, when you get down to it all game mechanics are illusions. The trick is to create an environment that's fun enough to play in.

The specifics of which are rather malleable.

 

[Helmling]

I feel silly for actually writing this down, but here goes.
It doesn't matter how many units you have, how many cities, how many social policies, how many techs. It only matters how many of these you have compared to the strongest of the AIs. You can pursue a certain victory type (OOC) from start or decide after 200 turns. All it matters is that you win. Please stop trying to turn Civilization into something that isn't = your own brainchild game.

Hi, welcome to CivFanatics. You'll find that 98% of what is said on these forums takes the form of "I wish Civ would do this..." and you'll also find that many of those ideas get picked up and turned into mods for the community. What's more, past discussions like that have actually become part of the main game since this forum has been monitored by the developers since Civ 3's inception.

So you see, around here, we actually encourage folks to turn Civ into their own brainchild game. Again, welcome to the forums!

 

[Helmling]

It is when you run afoul of gameplay considerations. Besides, the game/company doesn't call civ V a model, it calls it a game, and for a reason.

Also, the implication that EVERY action should have potentially negative consequences (beyond opportunity cost) is completely ridiculous. Opportunity cost is a legit negative, by the way. Ignoring it can easily cost a player games, something of which it is very very hard to convince many rookies and even some veterans.

I was hardly arguing that EVERY decision should have the potential to backfire (let me think about that some more, since I'm not saying the opposite either). I was arguing (agreeing with someone else actually) that the CIV civics systems was better than the linear progression in CiV. Of course, the CIV also had a heavy linearity to it because the later civics were almost invariably "better" modes of organizing your civilization, but at least the civics had some back and forth.

Take this situation, it wasn't unheard of that I would have to, in a CIV game, back off my democratic civics to institute a draft through Nationhood (or whatever). Now, in CiV, I don't have that option and frankly, there are a few games I've abandoned as defeats when an unexpected war derailed my civilization completely.

All of which also leads to my biggest complaint about Civ as a series, which goes back to the comment on the general gameplay dynamic someone made earlier:

Civ is actually a racing game.

Of course, the Rise and Fall mod for CIV dealt with this, though I never did try it out, but Civ presents its model of history as a linear progression, deeply rooted in an understanding of history as progressive (hence the observations about CIV's civics above).

Now, like someone said, it's a game. What I've always said back to people when they throw up their arms like that with the "it's just a game" defense is that it is a game that derives its escapist fun from modeling history.