[NFP] History Simulator or Game: Civ's precarious balancing act

[Abaxial]

I think of chess, where it's considered bad manners to play on after it is obvious who is going to win.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Personally, I get really invested in the early/mid game of Civ, but tend to get frustrated and lose interest in the late game when victory is obvious but there's still a very long clock to run out. In Civ VI usually by about the time you hit the industrial era the snowball has started, and for Civ VII I hope there's two issues that can be addressed:

1. Keep competitive engagement going longer
2. If you can't always achieve that, how about a way to conclude the game early?

Like for #2 if you're playing an online match of Starcraft technically to achieve victory you have to destroy every last structure your opponent has built, but well before you get there when one side sees they've lost they type gg and tap out. Civ lacks this ability in single player, and when it's obvious you're going to win there can still be hours of playtime left to actually achieve a victory condition.

Civilization is a game meant to be played from stone age to space age. As such, I heavily favor the 1st option. It should be made to be fun untill the space race.

This reminds me a Soren Johnson conference about "good AI vs fun AI". In a symetrical game, the AI plays exactly the same rules as the human, a "good AI" is one that can challenge him (for instance "chess"). In an asymetrical game, ennemies have their own behaviours and a "fun AI" is one in which the human players need to play with those to win (for instance action-adventure games such as "Zelda Breath of the Wild").

I like a lot your earlier comparison with Super Mario Kart because I believe both games share similar issues. At first sight, they feel like symetrical games, yet in digging a bit, they also need asymetrical features to be made "fun". On higher difficulties, for a race to remain challenging untill the very end, you need to help the AI catching back. And even if you make a perfect race in the first two laps, you are still at risk to lose it all at the third lap.

So yeah, to me the obvious way to make later eras more interesting in Civilization is in allowing the AI to catch back. That's not even historically inaccurate, as that happened all the time. As Soren Johnson put it in his conference, the problem isn't that the AI cheat, but that it is seen. So the whole difficulty is about how implementing a catching back mechanism smartly, so that the cheat wouldn't feel too obvious and would still make enough sense to be accepted by the player. To continue with the Mario Kart analogy, maybe something equivalent to the blue shell (or something feeling less unfair)?

Here's Soren Johnson's conference for those interested.