Dismiss Civilopedia

[Howitzer]

OK I might get a little bit bullied with this, but why do we need locally stored civilopedia inside a 2019 game?

I mean it's more to download for us, we use it rarely, I mean for every 5 hours in the game does anyone spend more than 5 minutes in civilopedia?

And maybe that much only in the first couple of weeks after new Civ launch..

More to code for the devs, more to debug, why not make it link to a web portal instead of coding it in the game.

it was coded in the game in the past cause there was no or very slow internet,
But nowadays it will save devs time and work and they will focus a bit more on gameplay..

What do you think??

 

[Infixo]

Civilopedia displays real-life data from database, including custom mods, civs, etc.
There is already more than 2000 mods on Steam, how do you imagine putting that into web?

 

[679x]

Since the Civilopedia doesn't really give in-depth descriptions of things, I rarely find much use for it; instead, I just google whatever it is I want to learn more about and look for info on it on the fan wikis. I like having it around but only if it's actually useful.

I can think of many examples just off the top of my head where the civilopedia is lacking. Pages on specific districts, e.g. Entertainment Complex, do not tell you anywhere that this district will give +1 Appeal to adjacent tiles. I only ever found out that certain districts enhance appeal when I found it listed on the "Neighbourhoods and Appeal" page. The Medic page is much worse; I wanted to know whether they would actively heal units when they or the Medic move around, or if the unit had to be fortified and healing for the medic's heal boost to come into effect. It doesn't tell you anything like that, and I don't think it even tells you how much extra healing medics provide. IIRC it also doesn't tell you that archaeologists can only excavate as many artifacts as can fit in its home city's museum.

That being said, though, it is very easy for modders to add info from their mods into the civilopedia, so at least it's useful for finding more info on the mechanics of modded units/civilizations/buildings.

 

[How to know]

personally I find it hard to imagine why anyone would want to get rid of this feature. It is not like a bug getting in the way while we are playing, it is simply a self-help manual for us to use, it's not like it take enormous job to code it, while the major task for is is finding appropriate information and put them into text, which are almost certainly not done by people who are actually making the game, in the ways that make all those mechanics we like or hate.

you mentioned internet, great, if everyone are connected in any place in any time, which is obviously not true, and as a game that at least pretend to be historical, aiming to not just strategy fans but also those true-or-not history buffs, it holds its face. While the vocabulary that are in the game are fairly simple until now, I can imagine someone who are less interested in history or sociology or economy or whatever wondering why Congo is a civilization, what is amenity, why the table salt we eat everyday is a luxury resource. Wikipedia is certainly useful in these scenarios, but it is good to have the interpretation from the developers' side. They are stereotypical, and that's great, this whole series is based on stereotype, sometimes we just want to know that Petra can magically turns desert into land of milk and honey, they are not interested with its culture, its people, its trades, its impact on Jones, a much simplified introduction is really what many people needs.

 

[Howitzer]

Nowhere in my post you ll see me saying anything about a third party website like Wikipedia.. The link I'm referring to, could be the firaxis special civilopedia portal/website

As a matter of fact, I do not judge content at all. I say only that since it's of small use/importance to most, or better say, IF it is of small use/importance to most, and since it takes time and resource, if it would be a good idea to host online to save our resources and mostly developers time.

Although it may not take much time to code I'm not a programmer to know, I'm sure it takes lot of time to test and blend

 

[How to know]

Nowhere in my post you ll see me saying anything about a third party website like Wikipedia.. The link I'm referring to, could be the firaxis special civilopedia portal/website

As a matter of fact, I do not judge content at all. I say only that since it's of small use/importance to most, or better say, IF it is of small use/importance to most, and since it takes time and resource, if it would be a good idea to host online to save our resources and mostly developers time.

Although it may not take much time to code I'm not a programmer to know, I'm sure it takes lot of time to test and blend

Granted, many apologies for misinterpreted the web portal thing. I believe your argument is it is taking up time, money and resources to make it for the developers, and it increased downloading time and occupy space in our hard-drive. I am not and would probably never be in game industry, but I do know that the development process is really long, and graphic and major mechanics are taking the biggest share of pie, these mechanics are the ones that requires have-skilled coder, at the mean time, things like civilopedia are like light industry that can be done by initials and can be left to the newcomer of the development team. In the case of civilopedia, the text part does require literature skills to provide the immersion we expected from a heavily historical based game, but writers work parallel to the coders, that type, and the text is is pasted into the code system. I can be wrong that civilopedia required heavy input in terms of codding, but I just don't see it as possible. That's on the developers' part.

On our players' part, if you ever play visual novel, text based adventure or other text-orientated games, you can see that all the sizes comes into the graphics, the images, the text themselve consist of tiny amount of the whole game in terms of memory. That being said, when it comes to localisation, things suddenly becomes complicated for those flavor text, but that would take another thread to talk about...

Overall, as long as it doesn't pop up every 10 seconds while I am trying to think off where to build my third city, I would want to keep this feature even if I normally don't use it, simply because when I want it, I want it fast.

 

[kaltorak]

I would like them to improve it, not scrap it!

 

[Ivan Hunger]

Although it may not take much time to code I'm not a programmer to know, I'm sure it takes lot of time to test and blend

You'd be wrong about that. Something like the civilopedia takes no time at all to code or test. In terms of download time, its file size is so small that it would take less than a second to download on even the slowest internet connections.

Rest assured, the amount of development resources spent on the civilopedia is negligible to the point of being nonexistent.