Extreme Tech Review (5. Aug 2010)

[Churchdown Yank]

Great article and good find.

It's going to be hard for us all to keep up with analyzing all the info that will come out over the next few weeks before the demo!

I will say this is the first piece of solid info that makes me a little worried that Civ V will not be intricate enough to hold my attention - and the attention of the rest of the community for working out strategies - like Civ IV did.

 

[Disgustipated]

City revolts are out too? And culture is nearly meaningless? *sigh* I suppose the game can now be played by 10 year olds. I suppose that is good...

No corruption or pollution? What is the negative to high production cities then?

I'm assuming global warming is out too? What are the negatives of using nukes?

 

[bjbrains]

City revolts are out too? And culture is nearly meaningless? *sigh* I suppose the game can now be played by 10 year olds. I suppose that is good...

He means civil disorder from Civ 3. And culture isn't meaningless by any means, look at the power of the social policy trees.

 

[Disgustipated]

Great article and good find.

It's going to be hard for us all to keep up with analyzing all the info that will come out over the next few weeks before the demo!

I will say this is the first piece of solid info that makes me a little worried that Civ V will not be intricate enough to hold my attention - and the attention of the rest of the community for working out strategies - like Civ IV did.

I suspect it will be fun for a month or two, then we will tire of it. Hopefully mods can make the game as complex as Civ4.

 

[Vraslosken]

Here's proof that battles do have random results... "This isn't always 100 percent accurate—on a couple of occasions, we saw bloody defeats in what we were led to expect would be decisive victories—"

This proves that the author doesn't really understand probability. The numbers aren't inaccurate just because you lose a battle where the winning chances were high.

 

[bjbrains]

This proves that the author doesn't really understand probability. The numbers aren't inaccurate just because you lose a battle where the winning chances were high.

Yea, I don't know why everyone is going crazy over this preview just because the guy happened to be negative. He's even actively wrong about several things: Namely how culture works (it's still the main determinant of borders, and now has added importance), not understanding the combat system properly, not knowing that civil disorder was removed back in civ 3, and thinking corruption and pollution were 'taken out' (Civ 3 people!). He then goes to post about how it's not as complex without saying how its not as complex besides religion being gone. I don't get it, read some of the other previews and I feel you get a better impression. None of the other previews say the same things about the game.

 

[Disgustipated]

civ4 had disorder too due to whipping

 

[Churchdown Yank]

I suspect it will be fun for a month or two, then we will tire of it. Hopefully mods can make the game as complex as Civ4.

Mods for some and also further development. Thinking back on the original release of Civ IV, it was a bit like this. Some new (religions mostly), some old - waaay better graphics ooh!. By the time we got to BtS we've got the full game.

Maybe V will be a bit like that. I like the hexes, I like 1 UPT and more tactical combat. I'm ok with stripping out the factions caused by religions, and the social policies look to be a bold innovation that essentially acts as a parallel tech tree.

I worry about things like diplo and trading mechanics and the AI.

 

[bjbrains]

civ4 had disorder too due to whipping

Are you talking about the random event from BTS? Because that's not really relevant.

 

[Disgustipated]

Mods for some and also further development. Thinking back on the original release of Civ IV, it was a bit like this. Some new (religions mostly), some old - waaay better graphics ooh!. By the time we got to BtS we've got the full game.

Maybe V will be a bit like that. I like the hexes, I like 1 UPT and more tactical combat. I'm ok with stripping out the factions caused by religions, and the social policies look to be a bold innovation that essentially acts as a parallel tech tree.

I worry about things like diplo and trading mechanics and the AI.

Interesting the article doesn't mention diplomacy or AI (or did I miss it?). He does seem to infer that he lost a city to the Russians I believe it was. And he knows what the defeat screen look like. . But that really doesn't tell us much about the ai. I didn't see a screenshot of the diplomacy screen unless I missed it.

 

[ChristofferC]

It seems to me that one of the overarching goals Firaxis has had for Civ 5 is to reward the player when he does something good, but not to punish him severely when he does something bad. Most casual gamers don't want their games to tell them that they did something bad. They want to feel like infallible superheroes. Most people play most of their games on the easiest setting.

 

[Churchdown Yank]

I think the Eurogamer article has an interesting take.

Stripping the game back down to the basics to try and rework some things like combat. Making some of the mechanics more "accessible" and understandable without losing the complexity. Creating a foundation for further complexity over the next few years.

But there's so many articles and videos flooding in now... can't... keep... up....

You young ones scout ahead. I'll be along in a minute.

 

[bjbrains]

I wouldn't be too worried about diplo. I mean, they've gone out to make the AI more engaging, and have added new agreements/interactions such as new pacts (cooperation/secrecy), and fighting over resources/city states.

 

[PieceOfMind]

This proves that the author doesn't really understand probability. The numbers aren't inaccurate just because you lose a battle where the winning chances were high.

Not at all. In fact several people on civfanatics have made the same assumption (perhaps incorrectly).

On the screen when you are ready to attack, it would have said "Major Victory". There's nothing at all obvious about that says "there's probability involved here and you could conceivably lose this battle".

It looks like the attempt to divert attention away from combat odds is only making people more confused than before. Now people are expecting that the predicted (i.e. most likely) outcome is the actual outcome.

If the numbers are gone, I will just make another ACO mod. Removing combat odds, if they can be worked out from info available to the player (highly likely IMO) is leaning towards dumbing the game down or at least removing valuable info from the interface. And yes, this is a complaint and I'm happy to admit it.

 

[Aramel]

I don't understand at all how the reviewer is complaining that culture is less important than in Civ IV. In Civ IV, culture was entirely useless except for you border cities, right up until the point you won a culture victory. If anything, culture seems far more important in Civ V than previously, as you can use it for social policies and you actually have to worry about it longer than your first border pop.

 

[a5ehren]

Those specs he listed were the specs of the previewer's system, not the minimum or recommended specs. You'll be able to play on a lesser system than that, just not with max details at 1920x1200.

 

[morss_4]

If the numbers are gone, I will just make another ACO mod. Removing combat odds, if they can be worked out from info available to the player (highly likely IMO) is leaning towards dumbing the game down or at least removing valuable info from the interface. And yes, this is a complaint and I'm happy to admit it.

My understanding though was that combat in Civ V isn't binary. It's not a win/loss thing where you would say "you're going to win 56% of the time". The logical extension is to put in an expectation value for losses on each side...which from what I can see is more or less what they've done. You could perhaps add a standard deviation or something, or you could provide a probability density graph, that seems like overkill though.

 

[MajorDisaster84]

I submit that the screenshots he posted reflect an earlier build of the game than, say, the one we saw in the recent IGN video. Unit options seem to be missing relative to the IGN video, and the unit graphic in the lower left reflects the same graphics we saw in the E3 video, not the smaller version we saw in the IGN video.

 

[sdlufkin]

Those specs he listed were the specs of the previewer's system, not the minimum or recommended specs. You'll be able to play on a lesser system than that, just not with max details at 1920x1200.

Also, in game development it's farily common to get the optimization done last, or nearly last, so it will run even better at release.

 

[bjbrains]

My understanding though was that combat in Civ V isn't binary. It's not a win/loss thing where you would say "you're going to win 56% of the time". The logical extension is to put in an expectation value for losses on each side...which from what I can see is more or less what they've done. You could perhaps add a standard deviation or something, or you could provide a probability density graph, that seems like overkill though.

I agree. I'm calling foul on the previewer (or a bug in the system). In every combat we've seen, the combat always reflects the results that were predicted mostly, with only minor deviations.