Image Dissection/Discussion #2

[Abaddon]

So, from this image.. what can we work out?

I don't like how obvious the different terrain tiles are.. they could be much better blended imo..

 

[Dale]

Images are mocked up at this phase for marketing purposes. Anyone remember the infamous 15 tile city from a Civ4 preview a few months out from release? With around 6 months of dev time left the game we end up with will be totally different to the game we see here.

The faked Civ4 15 tile city mockup:

 

[Truronian]

Culture/city radius seems to be working differently. Maybe choice tiles come under your control earlier, or mountains and hills inhibit culture spread?

 

[Krzowwh]

The flatland, hills, mountain system seems to still be thus, as well as desert, plains, grassland to be available terrains. River are again between tiles. Culture appears to spread more easiily in the regular flatlands. The coast appears not only to encircle the land by one tile. City names are not visible, either indicating too close zoom, or ability to remove labels?

Opinions:
Coastline is too straight, not enough fractalized derivation.
Blending of terrain is also too sharp.
Borders are harder to see.
Rivers also too smooth at this level.

 

[Chimera1804]

One thing that jumped out at me was the ocean on the left side....what the heck is with that little random circle of ocean? and then in the top left again...the "coast" extends out to sea...

Also, notice how many units there are...for what i assume to be an early stage of the game there are an awful lot of units just wandering about...I counted seven. I'd like to know how this fits in with the fact that they're claiming that the number of units will be reduced...

The cultural borders seem to be selective. Notice how in the front city you have your first ring, but then the "second ring" doesn't include any of the northern tiles. I would assume this is because the player gets to choose which tiles, and if tile working mechanics are anything similar to Civ IV, the southern tiles are much better than the northern ones..what I assume to be desert hills and mountains are excluded in favor of some riverside plains...that or you choose to expand in a certain direction...every time your borders expand you choose x number of tiles to add or something...(I know this has been speculated upon over and over...I'm just writing what I see)

I'm not going to go much into the graphics themselves because, as was pointed out in another thread, these graphics are probably not what the final result will look like...they're just basic graphics to get the code running. But if these are just basic graphics, the final result's gonna be SWEET!

 

[Herrhals]

just like cIV, the terrain looks like a patchwork quilt of terrains. Need better terrain integration. Actually, they need to keep the terrain pretty consistent over a given territory, as is more realistic.

The above picture looks like that game where you see the pictures and are asked to circle "what does not fit with the others". the dark mountains look out of place. Mountains that tall are usually clumped. Mountain ranges in cIV looked awful!

 

[Chimera1804]

The above picture looks like that game where you see the pictures and are asked to circle "what does not fit with the others". the dark mountains look out of place. Mountains that tall are usually clumped. Mountain ranges in cIV looked awful!

Well, at least the mountains have craggy looking hills around them...that's an improvement from Civ IV where mountains would just stick out of nowhere...although I do agree that they are way too dark for the surroundings...

Again, though, these graphics are probably only a basic model. I mean, look at the border between the coastal waters and the deep ocean waters...just one shade between them! For me, that proves that we can expect much higher quality screenshots in coming months and shouldn't read too much into the graphics just yet.

 

[jfuesting]

I'm guessing from the screenies so far, that what we are seeing is pretty much the combat and global engine at work. We don't see any city details, almost as if the cities we are seeing are just there as 'plop downs' while units "moving around and doing stuff" is tested.

And if 1 unit/hex is held up (I hope so, SOD has gotta go) than seeing 7 units wandering about wouldn't be crazy, since there's presumably nothing or only one unit in a city.

 

[Hadrean]

It does look like there's two cities, so seven units isn't that bad. Maybe they're not all one civ's?

 

[Abaddon]

Border colour is the same, so i'd assume its two cities from the same nation

 

[Dale]

Border colour is the same, so i'd assume its two cities from the same nation

Are you blind? One's grey/yellow, the other's grey/white.

 

[CossackProblem]

"Culture" expansion is biased to one side, going further into the grasslands while stopping at the desert/mountains.

 

[killmeplease]

early civ4 screenshot:

 

[Steenberger]

The poor terrain blend somehow reminds me of Settlers II. Apart from that, shorelines/coast and woods are well made, and we can safely assume that they will function the same way as in Civ 4.

Apart from that, I deduce from the screenie that I will end up buying the game even though this screenie doesn't show me much.

 

[Steenberger]

The poor terrain blend somehow reminds me of Settlers II. Apart from that, shorelines/coast and woods are well made, and we can safely assume that they will function the same way as in Civ 4.

Apart from that, I deduce from the screenie that I will end up buying the game even though this screenie doesn't show me much.

 

[Hadrean]

Are you blind? One's grey/yellow, the other's grey/white.

They both look like they have Asian style buildings, the colors remind my of China and Mongolia?