E3 2005: Civ4 Live Stage Demo (GameSpot)

[pjdodd]

Not impressed....its eye candy built on lots of lovely stable (yeah right) direct x code and demonstrates almost nothing about the game mechanics.

What is it about later versions of good games (Sim City, Civ) that twist the graphics into infantile 3D rendered, graduated-shadowed placebos without fundamentally re-designing the game mechanics? Less time/money on the graphics guys and more on the structure and playability please. And less DirectX code....it's bad for silicon health.

 

[Civrules]

Not impressed....its eye candy built on lots of lovely stable (yeah right) direct x code and demonstrates almost nothing about the game mechanics.

What is it about later versions of good games (Sim City, Civ) that twist the graphics into infantile 3D rendered, graduated-shadowed placebos without fundamentally re-designing the game mechanics? Less time/money on the graphics guys and more on the structure and playability please. And less DirectX code....it's bad for silicon health.

As far as I know, there's some considerable amount of innovation to gameplay, so it's not just all eye-candy.

 

[pjdodd]

My point is....where is the demonstration of the innovation?
Read the posts before you reply, please.

 

[toft]

I think Soren was nervous during the demonstration. He should have been showing more about gameplay than the new graphics. He could have showed a lot of new things in 13 mins... well thats my opinion

 

[Louis XXIV]

They listed a lot of stuff, although they didn't show much of the stuff. Still, I get the impression that a lot of the stuff requires more than one turn to see its full effect and might be difficult to understand completely in a video. Could you fully understand culture by watching someone else play?

 

[oldStatesman]

We live in the era of instant gratification, the 30 second soundbite and realtime chat...in today's marketing, Graphics are sexy, strategy is boring. Keep the faith....it was a only a demo video geared to that fact of business and marketing life. Beside, Soren himself has said he is still working on improving the AI - probably the graphics were all that were ready for 'prime time'.

 

[Chieftess]

I guess you don't want to show too much stuff right away. What if they take something out? Also, you can tell there were a few incomplete things in the demonstration.


BTW, Soren does the AI code, not the graphics.

 

[microbe]

My point is....where is the demonstration of the innovation?
Read the posts before you reply, please.

Then watch and listen to the video before you complain, please.

Only the first few minutes showed graphics, and all later parts were about game play, like civics, great people, culture, modding, and a lot more. If you are unable to extract and digest such information from the video itself, see various posts about all the things people gathered from the video.

 

[CivArmy s. 1994]

Hey, I saw two different Chinese leaders in the video, there is more then one leader per civ now???
If someones knows the rules to produce a new leaderhead for Civ4, please, post in somewhere (and advise me). These rules r number os frames, size of the windows, extension of the files...

 

[GoodGame]

- Every resource has an associated improvement (e.g., winery for wines). It's not clear whether these are built city improvements or worker-type land improvements, however.

The implication I got was that it was worker-type improvement (multiple windmills, etc..). I'm wondering if they'll simulate a working economy that way, with the benefits then going to the city working those tiles.

Tech:
- OR prereqs confirmed. Need A or B to get C if they link up before C. This has all kinds of interesting repercussions, but it's hard to predict how it will pan out in the game....

The implication I got here was that "OR" will be the only type of technology node relationships. So tech's are picked up by association, by surfing the node tree.
Will the direction of travel on the nodes be "past to future" only or will it be possible to surf from "future to past" (that could actually be more economical in some situations, and simulate by-passing technology as 'unnecessary').

Religion in a city gives line-of-sight benefit. Guess is that it's to the civilization which owns the holy city of that religion.

Now it makes sense. The 'internationalness' of religion acts like a free spy.


On the leaders, they said not all civs will actually have multiple choices (at least for the leader heads), since history wasn't always so kind.

I hope it'll be possible to play the game 'un-biased', that is without historical prejudice (e.g. destinied UU's, etc..)

 

[rzawrekta]

Apologies if these are in other threads.... Things I jotted down quickly on my first view of this....
-snip-

Religion:
- Great Prophets can start a golden age, rush some wonders, or maybe more. Not clear if that's shared by all great leaders or not.
- Missionaries are units that move around the board. They appear to have high move...ATAR or use enemy roads or something -- at least the one showed did. They convert a city to a different religion. Guess that it's to the religion of their holy city of origin? Their city of origin?
- Guess that you have to convert your own cities to youre religion using missionaries, or they'll be free for conversion.
- Religion in a city gives line-of-sight benefit. Guess is that it's to the civilization which owns the holy city of that religion.
- Mahavera (sp?) is a great prophet. (For Daoism???)

-snip-

What'd I miss? Or get wrong?

Arathorn

Mahavera actually is a Jain prophet. It would be cool if they have Jainism in Civilization, but something tells me they're going to use him for Daoism or Hinduism just cause they don't know any better. =p

 

[dc82]

perhaps the prophet, or great leader are randomized (non civ-specific). that mite create a few problems, but that mite be on possibility y we have mahavera for daoism.

 

[oldStatesman]

perhaps the prophet, or great leader are randomized (non civ-specific). that mite create a few problems, but that mite be on possibility y we have mahavera for daoism.

Ouch ... that would be a mess... Moses for Buddhism ... Confucious for Christianity .... I hope they did not do that. Of coarse, there are Jewish "Cathedrals" ... that is bad enough...yikes!

 

[aneeshm]

I don't want to stream it ( bandwidth problems ) , so is there any way to download it ?

Edit : Forget it . I found a way to dump a raw stream to a file . I had to look through the man page , but it was worth it . I love mplayer . I'll see if I can encode it to some compressed format and upload it . Is that illegal ?

 

[Commander Bello]

BTW, am I the only poor idiot who is not allowed to have a look at that video?

The three footages are o.k. to be downloaded, but by no means I get any streaming to work, although even the rocket thing in the window to the right is displayed properly.
Any hints?

BTW: Windows Media Player 10 installed, XP with Service Pack 2, newest driver for the graphics card, DSL 1024kbit, IE or Firefox - it's all the same. I don't get any streaming from GameSpot.

[edit] it ran once for appr. 2 minutes... never before, never after....

 

[oldStatesman]

BTW, am I the only poor idiot who is not allowed to have a look at that video?

The three footages are o.k. to be downloaded, but by no means I get any streaming to work, although even the rocket thing in the window to the right is displayed properly.
Any hints?

BTW: Windows Media Player 10 installed, XP with Service Pack 2, newest driver for the graphics card, DSL 1024kbit, IE or Firefox - it's all the same. I don't get any streaming from GameSpot.

[edit] it ran once for appr. 2 minutes... never before, never after....

Try in full screen view. Let it run for a minute or two (past the commercial). Fast forward a few times with the button. (the > button). Rewind a few times (the < button.)Stop it using the stop button. Make a blood sacrifice to the Streaming Video god. Restart it using the start button. FF/rev until the video starts using the slider. Then you can go back to the beginning and it will run until you close the window. Eventually doing these things I got it to work. But I have to go through that inane procedure every time( except the sacrifice - that was a joke ). They need to fix their stream.

 

[Ramalhão]

BTW: Windows Media Player 10 installed, XP with Service Pack 2, newest driver for the graphics card, DSL 1024kbit, IE or Firefox - it's all the same. I don't get any streaming from GameSpot.

Did streaming window open? If not, you're not allowing it to open. In Firefox, go to Options and give permission to "www.gamespot.com" open popup windows. In IE, disable popup blocker. Of course, enable it again when video is finished .

Hope that helps .

 

[dc82]

Ouch ... that would be a mess... Moses for Buddhism ... Confucious for Christianity .... I hope they did not do that. Of coarse, there are Jewish "Cathedrals" ... that is bad enough...yikes!

yeah i def. shutter at that thought and hope it's not the case. but then again... its kinda hard to come up w/ a civ-specific great leader for every civ. <<shrug>> good thing there's still a few months to make last minute changes.

 

[Commander Bello]

Did streaming window open? If not, you're not allowing it to open. In Firefox, go to Options and give permission to "www.gamespot.com" open popup windows. In IE, disable popup blocker. Of course, enable it again when video is finished .

Hope that helps .

Thanks to you and oldStatesman, but of course I've tried this already. The problem is due to an error 80077249, which seems to be caused by a missing or unconnected socket.
Again, all updates are available (or should be,as far as I can see). I tried some other sites with streaming videos, and everything worked perfectly. It really seems to be related to an inconsistency between my computer and Gamespot.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

On the unit upgrade micromanagement, I think that may be minimized by giving units a limited number of upgrades to choose from (so a Tank can choose flanking bonus or mobility...but not any other bonuses, etc.)..possibly even no choice at all (a unit A of level X always has these bonuses which they gained in this order)