How do you think BERT is doing?

[Gort]

Will playing EU4 help prepare me for Stellaris?

Almost certainly. EU4 is the best Paradox game and you should play it based on its own merits anyway, but there will likely be a ton of mechanics that carry over. It's also £9 on Steam at the moment and has a demo if you want to try it for free, so you should definitely check it out.

You'll have lots of questions if it's your first Paradox game, so try the wiki here to help answer them.

 

[nimling]

Civ5 started terrible and stayed pretty bad, managing to fix some of the problems that should have been caught in the first game's development. The solution in Civ5 was to try and fix some of the blatant balance issues, but some things were doomed by a flawed design philosophy. BE, from the start, hasn't really fixed balance but patched over balance issues with new systems, ignorant of the underlying flaw. A flaw which could easily be fixed is the brokenness of trade routes, caused by the ass-backwards way TR gains are calculated, but instead of fixing the yields on trade routes, BE vanilla first merely capped TRs by population, and RT added a bunch of crap that doesn't address anything about why TRs break the game.

Definitely agreed on the AI playing to lose - that sort of thing is exactly what a decent 4X should try to avoid, and RT made it 10x worse if not moreso. AFAIK that is the sort of thing people who don't know good game design suggest on forums.

There is definitely something to say about a developer knowing when to ignore the fanbase and think about what makes a game good and interesting to play. I think the problem runs deeper that blaming the novice lead developer, but being pulled in multiple directions and something wrong with design philosophy in the past 5 years or so.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is, learn how to deal with Civ5 modding, and just try to make the game into something that is remotely playable. Unfortunately, the attitude of many people on this forum discourages me.

 

[Ryika]

Civ5 started terrible and stayed pretty bad, managing to fix some of the problems that should have been caught in the first game's development. The solution in Civ5 was to try and fix some of the blatant balance issues, but some things were doomed by a flawed design philosophy. BE, from the start, hasn't really fixed balance but patched over balance issues with new systems, ignorant of the underlying flaw. A flaw which could easily be fixed is the brokenness of trade routes, caused by the ass-backwards way TR gains are calculated, but instead of fixing the yields on trade routes, BE vanilla first merely capped TRs by population, and RT added a bunch of crap that doesn't address anything about why TRs break the game.

Definitely agreed on the AI playing to lose - that sort of thing is exactly what a decent 4X should try to avoid, and RT made it 10x worse if not moreso. AFAIK that is the sort of thing people who don't know good game design suggest on forums.

There is definitely something to say about a developer knowing when to ignore the fanbase and think about what makes a game good and interesting to play. I think the problem runs deeper that blaming the novice lead developer, but being pulled in multiple directions and something wrong with design philosophy in the past 5 years or so.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is, learn how to deal with Civ5 modding, and just try to make the game into something that is remotely playable. Unfortunately, the attitude of many people on this forum discourages me.

How can it discourage you? Wouldn't it be enough of a desirable goal to make it into something you enjoy?

Or are you saying that you assume that most people would not like your mod? Well, I assume that would probably be true, given that the people who play Civ 5 obviously like Civ 5 and the ones who really favor Civ 4 over Civ 5 still play Civ 4. Your opinion on Civ 5 is the minority opinion, there is no doubt about that.

 

[Westwall]

Will and David, if you don't know what you're doing, then dear god, please ask someone for help. Ask them to send someone from X-Com, ask freaking Sid Meier himself for gods sake. You two are going to single-handedly sink the beloved Civilization franchise.

Right on all points, and I think you really hit it home with this last note. Firaxis is sticking with these guys who are obviously trying to make this game work but ultimately have no idea what they're doing.

Their previous game was a very simple mobile app and here they're just way, way in over their heads with no clear vision or passion for the 4x genre.

They seem reluctant to actually make the game fun and engaging for fear of "going too far" and making it unbalanced or overly complicated and so players keep getting shafted with this bizarrely underwhelming and limp-wristed effort.

People are right to be angry about this and the company's oft delayed, anemic and aloof responses to player feedback is only exacerbating the problem.

 

[nimling]

I don't think it's necessarily a matter of "going too far", but going in wrong and conflicting directions while being stuck in a mess inherited from Civ5. It does not help that when problems are laid bare, including obvious bugs, the first reaction is to pretend the problem doesn't exist. Fixing trivial issues shouldn't take too long in a post-release patch, and there are quite a few.

Civ5 modding has been harsh, compared to Civ4 being quite mod-friendly.
I don't have a great deal of experience, but I'm quite sure AI routines are difficult to access, and given that the AI has to adapt to a fundamentally flawed game (due in part to 1UPT), this presents a major stumbling block. It was far easier to implement a form of limited unit stacking in Civ4 than to implement unit stacking in Civ5.
That doesn't address the many other issues with Civ5/BE design, like economy being stuck on a model which limits viable strategies to "get as much free stuff as possible".

My best advice would be to re-structure the basic game, fix unit stacking (since 1UPT has shown to be an unworkable mess), and basically start from scratch. That is what I would have loved from BERT.

The lore being not-compelling is something I don't particularly care about. I honestly wouldn't care if the sponsors/factions were complete blank slates, and player decisions defined unique perks (something I would do in a hypothetical mod by the way).

Making a mod is time and energy (and a lot for me to learn), and given the arrogant, asinine attitude of many on this forum, it feels like wasted effort when so many clamor for bad games.

Moderator Action: You are free to express your opinions about the game, but not other posters or their attitudes.

 

[Camikaze]

I'm unaware what happened to Scott Lewis.

He left Firaxis after Brave New World and joined Mohawk Games (led by Soren Johnson).

I think there are two things to keep in mind in relation to the rest of your post:

• Firaxis like young lead designers. Shafer and Johnson were both in their 20s when they led Civ5 and Civ4 respectively. They had more experienced teams around them, but the same is true of Will & Dave (notably, Anton Strenger).
• I think your recollection of Civ5 pre-G&K is a little too rosy. The general opinion of the game then was not substantially different to the general opinion of Vanilla BE (indeed, there were probably more detractors, simply because of the greater salience of the game).

 

[Gorbles]

I think there are two things to keep in mind in relation to the rest of your post:

• Firaxis like young lead designers. Shafer and Johnson were both in their 20s when they led Civ5 and Civ4 respectively. They had more experienced teams around them, but the same is true of Will & Dave (notably, Anton Strenger).
• I think your recollection of Civ5 pre-G&K is a little too rosy. The general opinion of the game then was not substantially different to the general opinion of Vanilla BE (indeed, there were probably more detractors, simply because of the greater salience of the game).

Amen to this. Lotta rose-vision on the early state of CiV, in my opinion.

 

[tailis]

I agree I'm probably having rose-vision. But Civ5 slowly got better right?

At this point however, is BE getting better?

I initially thought that instead of patches, they rolled up every single change into a paid expansion. "Okay, they want to get paid for patches, I can understand the profit motive". Except there was no patches. Every single gameplay, balance and engine problem from BE remains and gets exacerbated by RT.

What AI BE managed to inherit from Civ5 just got murdered by Diplomacy 2.0. The eco in BE was already bloated - everything was too plentiful and easy to come by (a spam fest), and RT made it even more bloated with diplo/artifact/affinity bonuses.

After the gameplay decisions and changes in RT, I can only see the game getting worse with Will and David as the designers.

 

[Westwall]

At this point however, is BE getting better?

Nope.

 

[PhilBowles]

Honestly the game feels like the B-team designed it.

Well, originally that's precisely what it was - a side-project a separate team worked on while the main team was making the Civ V expansions. I believe they said as much when it was announced.

 

[PhilBowles]

Almost certainly. EU4 is the best Paradox game

That's a pretty bold claim given how good Crusader Kings II became.

 

[PhilBowles]

Time for Blizzard to enter the genre and make it mainstream.

Sure, you'd have to pay 15€ or so for each Civilization and 10€ to change the name of your leader, but if the game is typical Blizzard-Non-WoW-Non-Release-Diablo-3-Quality... daaaaamn.

That, and you'd have the game trimmed to three leaders, two tech paths, half a dozen build options and two resources. Sure, simplifying has its virtues and Blizzard is very good at treading the right side of the line between slimming down and dumbing down, but for a 4x - unlike an RTS, an action RPG or an online card game - additional complexity is more appealing than less.

 

[PhilBowles]

I wonder if Firaxis seriously just asked two random interns whether they "wanted to try their hand at game design", thinking talent and artform can be simply taught to anybody.

From what I recall reading, it was their idea and Firaxis gave them the go-ahead, basically because it didn't interfere with BNW development and they didn't have anything else major in the pipeline that people on the Civ teams were working on.

And it's true as far as I know that they had no prior design lead role on anything in Firaxis or elsewhere, but it seems a little unkind to refer to them as "a couple of random interns" (not least unkind to interns, who can often be very capable). RT isn't comparable to either of Civ V's expansions in terms of what it brings to the game (it's perhaps comparable to the first big patch that fixed a lot of the glaring problems with Civ V vanilla, but having started Civ V only after that patch I can't compare with the earlier version), but it is an improvement over the base game.

I'll grant that it seems a poor show for a developer as major as Firaxis now is to use a spinoff from its flagship series as a way of giving its junior staff design experience. But if BE hadn't had its brand name or publisher it would be an adequate effort from people at this stage in their careers - I'd rather play BE even in vanilla than Amplitude's first effort Endless Space, for instance, which was also basically a simplified knock-off of a genre standard with dismal AI. And while I never got on with Endless Legend, that game is certainly leagues ahead of ES in design quality - it's entirely possible these new designers will go on to do better things after the misstep that was BE.

I feel that, while the expansion may have been positive for the game, overall Firaxis would have been better-off abandoning the Beyond Earth project and trying something new; without the constraints of the existing BE on top of the intrinsic constraints of the Civ V engine and AI, they might well make a better game on their second attempt, which they can't really show with an expansion.

 

[Westwall]

That, and you'd have the game trimmed to three leaders, two tech paths, half a dozen build options and two resources.

And it would still be better than BE.

 

[Ryika]

That, and you'd have the game trimmed to three leaders, two tech paths, half a dozen build options and two resources. Sure, simplifying has its virtues and Blizzard is very good at treading the right side of the line between slimming down and dumbing down, but for a 4x - unlike an RTS, an action RPG or an online card game - additional complexity is more appealing than less.

I actually don't think that's the case.

Blizzard is very good at finding that sweet spot of making games arcady™ while still keeping them complex enough to fit the audience of the game. So I don't fear that they'd streamline the game too much, as Blizzard would undoubtedly understand that a 4x needs options to be interesting.

But I do understand that/why people don't find a 4X "fitting" for Blizzard. I think one of the design philosophies that is ingrained in all Blizzard games is to remove redundant decisions and make those that remain count a lot. That goes very much against what traditional 4x offer - and even more so against the sheer endless amount of little, meaningless decisions in Beyond Earth..

So yeah, a Blizzard 4X would certainly be very different from existing 4X, but that's actually what I like about the idea. 4X and Blizzard are so far away from each other that I have no doubt that what Blizzard would create would be a completely different type of 4X, with ideas that would reshape the genre in one way or the other. Even if the Blizzard 4X were to turn out as something that I don't enjoy playing I would still be certain that its existence would have some heavy impact on how 4X are designed.

 

[PhilBowles]

I actually don't think that's the case.

Blizzard is very good at finding that sweet spot of making games arcady™ while still keeping them complex enough to fit the audience of the game. So I don't fear that they'd streamline the game too much, as Blizzard would undoubtedly understand that a 4x needs options to be interesting.

But I do understand that/why people don't find a 4X "fitting" for Blizzard. I think one of the design philosophies that is ingrained in all Blizzard games is to remove redundant decisions and make those that remain count a lot.

That's a fair assessment to some degree, at least as it applies to RTSes (it's very questionable whether removing the dialogue-based decision-making of an RPG is removing a 'redundant decision', since that's the core roleplaying element), but it's also the case that Blizzard never adds complexity in any new areas. Untangling what in a 4x is redundant or not is much more difficult than determining that an RTS only needs two resources instead of three, that it doesn't need to have granary-type buildings, or that worker improvement techs can be dropped and armour/weapon techs combined to trim the upgrade tree.

 

[Gorbles]

If that truly was Blizzard's ethos they wouldn't have gimped Starcraft 2's design to maximise artificial APM count to satisfy the competitive focus groups for the game.

They've been managing Diablo 3 well since the whole RMAH mess cleared up, but I think it took a lot of drastic internal re-organisation to do so.

Additionally, Blizzard would only ever do another game if they could fit it into their established universes. They wouldn't risk a new genre and a new IP at the same time (especially since they've already got one of those - Overwatch).

 

[Gort]

That's a pretty bold claim given how good Crusader Kings II became.

Yeah, Crusader Kings 2 is also excellent, particularly the character-driven events, which is an area Europa is lacking in. I find Europa less opaque, however, and it's definitely the better multiplayer game if that's your bag.

 

[PhilBowles]

Yeah, Crusader Kings 2 is also excellent, particularly the character-driven events, which is an area Europa is lacking in. I find Europa less opaque, however, and it's definitely the better multiplayer game if that's your bag.

No, I don't have a lot of interest in playing that sort of game multiplayer, which may be why I get on so well with CKII (for all that I haven't played it for a couple of years) - of all the games I've played it's the one that most feels as though the AI behaves the way people would, and while it often does stupid and self-destructive things, it does so in a context where people genuinely would tend to do stupid and self-destructive things of the same nature (so I can imagine a dissatisfied vassal who keeps launching uprisings doomed to failure as - indeed - a dissatisfied vassal rather than a program that hit a particular tolerance threshold).

I found EU very bare-bones in terms of what you could do with it, and the strategy aspect not all that appealing without the roleplaying element, but I haven't revisited it since the expansions were released and I know many people said at the time it needed expansions before it would compete with other Paradox games. So it's very likely that my experience with it is wholly out of date.

As for Stellaris, it looks good but it doesn't obviously seem to borrow anything from these Paradox games based on the screenshots - it looks closer to Distant Worlds (itself a very good game).

 

[Galgus]

If that truly was Blizzard's ethos they wouldn't have gimped Starcraft 2's design to maximise artificial APM count to satisfy the competitive focus groups for the game.

They've been managing Diablo 3 well since the whole RMAH mess cleared up, but I think it took a lot of drastic internal re-organisation to do so.

Additionally, Blizzard would only ever do another game if they could fit it into their established universes. They wouldn't risk a new genre and a new IP at the same time (especially since they've already got one of those - Overwatch).

I do agree that Starcraft 2 seems obsessed with APM, and that it turns off everyone but hardcore fans.

You could say though that they don't add complexity in the sense of some limited strategic options in optimal play.