It's the Egyptian Commander. From what I have observed, Commanders have more than one variation. I have seen two different Roman Commanders or Legati. One wears a leather lorica musculata and is unhelmeted, the other wears a galea and a lorica lintea. Similarly, I have seen three different Greek Commanders. One looks like Alexander the Great, another wears a bronze Phrygian helmet, and the third one wears no helmet. It's safe to assume other Commanders have similar variants.
That sounds like it could annoy a lot of players, if it applies to events that provide bonuses. If people are playing with a particular strategy in mind and they miss a bonus permanently because of RNG, I can see people being peeved.
I think it *could* turn out fine because the bonuses seem standardized instead of unique per event (good design choice in general, imho). What also needs to happen for it to work well is that the triggers are trivial enough that you're more or less guaranteed the same number of events. Then a random is actually good for variation. Always get the same number of events, always get the same rewards, but the flavor changes.
Like, if overbuilding is a trigger, that's basically guaranteed to happen sooner or later if it's in the pool. Maybe in another match it's about building two Gold buildings in a single tile, which is also more or less a guaranteed occurence.
Only when triggers become more complex and there's a chance that the combination of your given playstyle and the randomly chosen event pool doesn't mix well, then you run into issues. However, we've also seen glimpses of some sort of event quest system. I think that's the best way to go about more complex triggers: have a simple trigger start an event which then initializes a quest, the goals of which are the complex trigger. This way, the game tells you what you can achieve in the current game. Added value is that this way, you're actually chasing different targets every time instead of just getting lucky or once you know all the events metagaming for their occurence.
Standardized rewards is definitely the way to go. If they make a handful of super-difficult to trigger events with superior rewards, players will try to metagame them and then restart if they don't happen.
I disagree with the first point but agree with the second. For someone who puts hundreds or thousands of hours into a Civ game, 1,000 events is not a lot. But I do agree that Firaxis will surely continue to add more. With that in mind, 1,000 isn't a bad start.
Yeah, the main point is the distribution of those 1000 events. If you always get the same 50 and rarely see the other 950 it would feel they are not enough. That was something that happened to Old World in the very early builds.
I don't care too much for events, but what I do like is that you have some choice for the goody hut reward. So less chance to get something completely useless for your current situation.
For me the entire allure of random/conditional but surprising events lies in
a) The inability to optimize the fun and challenge out of them, the acceptance of the world of chaos where you can never predict everything, just like IRL
I very much want more of this in the game too, but I don't think events are the way to go. I would much rather some unpredictability be built into the game's underlying systems (like natural disasters, but many more of them).
Branding these as "Emergent narrative" is a dishonest attempt at getting ahead of potential criticism, but I for one like random events in 4X games. It's certainly not a first for Civilization either - Civ IV had them and they added a lot of variance and flavor there despite their simplicity.
I think it may be because there are different number of choices depending on the crisis, compared to the "stories" shown that are always two choices. That would lead to a "wall of text" effect that would be rather too much for some players. Especially since the crisis effect can be easily summed up by a few words on the cards.
Nothing prevented them from having only two choices per event for crisises as well. Where which specific event is triggered is based on how you are dealing with the crisis. Say you are successfully repelling barbarian forces and have won several battles. Then you get an event where barbarians are starting to adapt to the way you wage war and now you have a choice between Inferior Tactics and Barbarian Mercenaries crisis policies.
At the risk of opening up the Pandora's Box that is semantics, if these events are dependent on gameplay actions, does that not make the emergent (e.g. from gameplay), instead of being scripted?
At what level of % and weighing is a pseudorandom system no different from truly emergent choices players have to make fighting a (pseudorandomly-driven) AI tactics and strategy engine?
At the risk of opening up the Pandora's Box that is semantics, if these events are dependent on gameplay actions, does that not make the emergent (e.g. from gameplay), instead of being scripted?
At what level of % and weighing is a pseudorandom system no different from truly emergent choices players have to make fighting a (pseudorandomly-driven) AI tactics and strategy engine?
An "emergent narrative" or "procedural narrative" is any Video Game storyline that is not written ("embedded"note These terms were introduced by Marc LeBlanc (of MDA fame) at GDC 2000.) into the game by its developers, but emerges from the …
tvtropes.org
From this, this may be the most relevant section:
"Note that academic game studies further subdivide emergent narratives into "player-driven" and "procedural," with the former consisting only of immediate player actions and the player's interpretation of them; the latter, meanwhile, is comprised of the in-game events that have been built in by the devs but occur at runtime according to procedural logic, rather than to a writer's direction. The distinction is very fluid, however, so this trope basically blends them together. Lastly, there is also an ongoing research field of "computational narratives", where Video Game A.I. actually tries to parse and to direct in-game events and player actions as a dramatic narrative thread."
Like some others here, I thought "emergent narrative" meant what is called "player-driven" above. What Civ 7 is attempting might be what is labelled "procedural" above. Which seems close to completely different to me, so I don't know why they'd both be lumped together as "emergent", but I am not an academic in this field.
An "emergent narrative" or "procedural narrative" is any Video Game storyline that is not written ("embedded"note These terms were introduced by Marc LeBlanc (of MDA fame) at GDC 2000.) into the game by its developers, but emerges from the …
tvtropes.org
From this, this may be the most relevant section:
"Note that academic game studies further subdivide emergent narratives into "player-driven" and "procedural," with the former consisting only of immediate player actions and the player's interpretation of them; the latter, meanwhile, is comprised of the in-game events that have been built in by the devs but occur at runtime according to procedural logic, rather than to a writer's direction. The distinction is very fluid, however, so this trope basically blends them together. Lastly, there is also an ongoing research field of "computational narratives", where Video Game A.I. actually tries to parse and to direct in-game events and player actions as a dramatic narrative thread."
Like some others here, I thought "emergent narrative" meant what is called "player-driven" above. What Civ 7 is attempting might be what is labelled "procedural" above. Which seems close to completely different to me, so I don't know why they'd both be lumped together as "emergent", but I am not an academic in this field.
I'm not sure why you're introducing "inside" as an element of the definition? We're talking about what "emergent narrative" means in the context of a game. I've played plenty of board games over the year where a strong and memorable narrative arose from the gameplay that was not written into the game by the developer. People on this forum will talk frequently about the narratives that arose in their past games of Civ 7, and none of those were scripted by the dev team, yet they still came into existence (i.e. "emerged") during gameplay.
Sorry English is not my native language, so inside may not be the right word. I meant games can not have anything that is not written into their code.
I'm saying nothing of what players can imagine in their head.
That's the neat thing about emergence though. It's not something that "exists inside". Emergence is not found in the properties of individual entities. It is a property of the collection of elements itself.
Let's say I mod a forest area into Skyrim. There is not a single word of code for the canopy. In fact, the forest as such isn't even found anywhere in the mod's art, code, etc. Only individual trees. Trees and their location that I set up. The canopy only emerges from the situation.
Likewise, many people when they say "emergent narrative" mean a story the individual components of which aren't text boxes, scripted triggers, etc. but an interpretation of the unique combinations making up the current game state. The game's code does not contain a single line describing what a blood feud is. Yet, that is the story that emerges if a player has reoccuring wars with the same other player throughout the entire game. Building a government plaza in a remote city to boost its loyalty is already sufficient fuel for an emergent narrative. A game such as Civ is full of stories that can be summarized as "why the things are the way they are and what it means". "I built this encampment here because it's a choke point between me and Montezuma who keeps hating me" is already a story thread that has emerged and will combine with many others throughout the game into a dense and complex narrative.
It does require a bit of imagination and willingness to prefer immersive interpretations, yes. Which is why often the first civ game we played in our childhood is the most immersive to us. This ability to playfully interpret emergent patterns is extremely strong in younger years and it takes a lot of effort to maintain it into adulthood and also simply as we "see through" the game more and strategize more abstractly, having a comprehensive understanding of gameplay elements. When a Library is primarily "building that gives 3 science, 1 great scientist point, and costs 120 production, unlocked by Writing and requiring a Campus", you engage with emergent narration differently than when it's primarily "place of scholarship and research that will make your city a science hub which will propel your civ towards new exciting discoveries of the future."
Maybe that's why both players and devs feel a need at some point to strengthen scripted / "procedural" narration more, as subjectively a loss of narrative depth is being experienced.
I've said before, but I hate random events in 4x games, and my main hope is an option/mod to disable them. They always feel like a pop-up interrupting my gameplay, and I just quickly click a bonus to get them out of the way as quickly as possible.
I literally think the only 4x adjacent game I've enjoyed random events in was the old King of Dragon Pass, and they were half the point of the game.
The only thing that might make them palatable to me that I can think of is if they've included historical footnotes/citations (ie "this event was based on.../it was completely that...") to make me feel like I'm learning something interesting.
Events in any game can never be emergent if the definition is "not written", but they absolutely can add to the substrate on which those stories emerge.
This is my only concern with them. Otherwise they look great. I would prefer pop ups at the end of the turn, rather than the beginning. This is especially important in wars or when your units are attacked, so you can remember to check on said units. Civ 6 was really bad with the popups by the end of their cycle. I loved Gathering Storm, make no mistake. But the popups would interrupt you when you were trying to remember what you had to do at the start of the turn. Like when a barbarian moves next to a vulnerable unit that won't wake up on its own in such a situation. Usually with units on auto pathing. The popups would distract my train of thought.
I do like that some events are based on decisions you make. It's unlikely we'll ever see all of them. My only concern would be if you have 1 or 2 that just pop up every single game, that could get tiring. But I think we'll get enough variety to make it interesting.
I was just thinking earlier today how nice it would be if this were the case. Especially for policy changes, I'll often click away to look things over before choosing the cards but then get distracted and forget.
I was just thinking earlier today how nice it would be if this were the case. Especially for policy changes, I'll often click away to look things over before choosing the cards but then get distracted and forget.
They could just put it in the same menu as the other turn things (production queue empty, unit needs order, pick a new tech, etc.) just add "Narrative event waiting" [unless you just did an action that triggered the narrative event during your turn.. then it still should have a "wait till later" option.]
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