Do big ships bother you too?
- Thread starter GuiSKJ
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moysturfurmer
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Only when they are grouped up into a stack. Guess they're clipper ships.
I would prefer if the units were scaled down overall and the UI unit icons bigger, but I suppose its reverse for a reason - to bring attention to the gorgeous 3D assets. Anyway, in the future you and I might be part of the target audience for a R.E.D. mod (as long if it doesn't mess up animations, which is not certain) and a camera zoom one. I might prefer to play the game with the unit size very roughly matching the buildings too, but it doesn't bother me that much.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
The problem with 'realstic' sized units on the map is shown graphically (pun intended) in the game ARA: the men/equipment in the individual units are nicely rendered, but you cannot see any of them unless you zoom in. Once zoomed in, you cannot see enough of the map to do anything else, so you have to zoom out. After doing this a few times, if you are me, you start to get a pounding headache, shut down the game and don't open it again.
Choices have to be made: beautiful graphics and animations have to be big enough to see or they are wasted, Grand Strategy sized maps for games at Civ's scale (or ARA's, for that matter) have to show more than a few acres of terrain at a time. Short of wall-sized computer screens, we cannot have both at once.
Civ has made a choice, and a compromise by having oversized units so that both the map and the unit can be shown at once, without modifying the screen shot to see both of them. Another compromise, so common it almost goes unnoticed, is that 'units' are squad-sized - 1 - 2 vehicles or 5 - 10 men, and nothing like the hundreds of figures in ARA units - which you have to zoom in considerably to see at all.
At least the Civ compromises don't give me a headache . . .
Choices have to be made: beautiful graphics and animations have to be big enough to see or they are wasted, Grand Strategy sized maps for games at Civ's scale (or ARA's, for that matter) have to show more than a few acres of terrain at a time. Short of wall-sized computer screens, we cannot have both at once.
Civ has made a choice, and a compromise by having oversized units so that both the map and the unit can be shown at once, without modifying the screen shot to see both of them. Another compromise, so common it almost goes unnoticed, is that 'units' are squad-sized - 1 - 2 vehicles or 5 - 10 men, and nothing like the hundreds of figures in ARA units - which you have to zoom in considerably to see at all.
At least the Civ compromises don't give me a headache . . .
chaosprophet
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I don't see why you would feel bothered particularly by the ships when the game is full of things out of scale. The world isn't much in scale with limitations like a mountain being able to be just one tile, not scaling well with the rest of the world map, and the map doesn't scale well with anything else (cities and units). Cities buildings tend to work better with each other but with things like x number of buildings per tile, while things like wonders would cover a full tile, then not all buildings are really at scale with each other, and even less with improvements. And any unit is also very not at scale with other types of units (land, naval, air), definitely not with the map and buildings. And even with some other units of same type, especially when you get later in the game. While people in land are generally more in scale with each other, it is unlikely machines like tanks will be, or an galley with a battle ship, etc etc.
And the reason is pretty simple, having it all in scale would make it pretty much an unreadable mess with units being tiny in the map. If you altered the scale of the map, you would likely need to change a lot how the game would work too, instead of the current form of being tile based.
And the reason is pretty simple, having it all in scale would make it pretty much an unreadable mess with units being tiny in the map. If you altered the scale of the map, you would likely need to change a lot how the game would work too, instead of the current form of being tile based.
It's not really possible to have the map and units at the same scale in a game like this, so some visual disconnect is inevitable.
I really like that they put crews on the pre-modern ships that are sort-of-kind-of the same scale as the figures in the land units.
I really like that they put crews on the pre-modern ships that are sort-of-kind-of the same scale as the figures in the land units.
Trav'ling Canuck
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It's not just this game, it's been a problem forever. All of my old miniature armies had the same problem. Even when I went down to 6mm scale from the "normal" 15 mm scale, the buildings, hills, rivers and trees still had to be much smaller than was realistic for the size of the soldiers, and the detailing on the soldiers became close to impossible to see. Sticking with 15mm made it easier to distinguish the soldiers, but made the scale distortion compared to terrain features much worse.
evonannoredars
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Game was always felt more like a board game turned into a computer game to me anyway, so I don't mind the size disparity, especially with how that they're leaning into that diorama style.
The other option is to make the ships much smaller to better blend in with the map, which they have usually done in Civ5 and previous. I think the Civ7 version is an interesting and different way to do it, especially with the new persistent combat animations.
chaosprophet
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I still don't see how they are that particular massive in comparison with other units. like the two store sized horses or the land units taller than all those buildings.
Trav'ling Canuck
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I know, and you're right, its a matter of figuring out "to what degree should the ships be wrong" and that's a matter of preference. It looks like they've rendered the ships closer in scale to the other military units, rather than to the buildings on the map. Which allows them to showcase the ship's crew amongst other details, but makes the ships pretty darn big, because they are, relative to people. There's definitely room for them to downscale the ships to something closer to the scale used in past Civ games, and I think I agree with you that slightly smaller ships would probably look better when they're alongside the shore and looming over everything they pass, but out on open water the current-sized ships probably look better. Will be hard to know for sure until we see how they look during actual gameplay.
Disgustipated
Deity
Well... I did serve on an aircraft carrier after all. So I guess that includes me as well.
As for the graphics, the land units are bigger as well. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. So much of this game I have to judge when it's displayed on my monitor right in front of my eyes.
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
When Civ VI first came out the units were both hugely out of scale with the rest of the map and simplified cartoons. I detested both aspects of them, but stuck it out because I was completely played out on Civ V (7000 hours!) and needed a new Civ 'fix'.
Right up to the end the Civ VI units are still cartoonish crap, but the massive over-sized aspect seems to have mattered less and less - especially after playing some other games in which the units were closer to 'actual' size (or at least, more right-sized with the rest of the map) and discovering that I could barely tell anything about the units from the graphic, and had to rely on Icons and other data just to play the game.
Bottom line, the over-sized unit graphics sort of grow on you, and in respect to useable Graphic User Interface, I now regard them as essential to being able to extract information from the map and unit graphics without having to rely on 'extra' icons or tabular data.
Sagax
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Oversized ships don’t bother me as much, as most of the time they are seen against the vastness of featureless water tiles, making them feel less out of place. Oversized land units are much bigger offenders in my book.
But then again, model rescaling is usually one of the first mods that pop out after release, so it has always been an easy fix, albeit external.
But then again, model rescaling is usually one of the first mods that pop out after release, so it has always been an easy fix, albeit external.
Yep, what would really bother me would be to not be able to make R.E.D. for civ7 (hope they'll bring back SQL queries for Artdef like for civ5, civ6' R.E.D. was a pain to maintain...)
I get the impossibility to scale everything relatively to the map of course, but I do get bothered by massive scale differences in the same domains, for example buildings taller than mountains in civ6, galley almost as big as an aircraft carrier, biplane fighters as large as strategic bombers, soldiers taller than tanks, ...
Boris Gudenuf
Deity
I agree that relative sizes could be better implemented on both terrain and units and between the two. Just remember that if any of the graphics are supposed to convey useful information to the gamer, the smallest element still has to be big enough - or unique/individual enough - to convey it.
That, unfortunately, is where too many game designs fall short, IMHO.
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