Verrucosus
Warlord
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2002
- Messages
- 267
Like most of you I'm thrilled to come here and find out that Civ5 has been announced. I suspect that as far as gameplay is concerned, the train has left the station a while ago and there's just a lot of tweaking and polishing going on. As important as that is, I don't think we can do that much about it, so it's best to sit back, relax and hope to be pleasantly surprised when the time comes.
An area where minor, but important changes can still be made is, I hope, the game's interface and its documentation.
A few thoughts here:
- Medium Zoom: There should be a method of moving units effectively on a medium zoom level. Civ4's combining the zoom-out with tilting the map towards the classic top-down view is visually pleasing, but telling units apart when all you see is their heads is more difficult than it should be. I'm not sure whether the better solution is to forget about the tilt or to use old-style unit markers once you get to the top-down view or something else, but there is room for improvement here.
- World Map: There should be some way of looking the entire world map that makes use of the whole screen like the old F10 screen in Civ1. In Civ4, on round worlds even the maximum zoom does not give us the entire world and a lot of screen space is wasted on ... well ... space. The globe view is stunning of course, but not functional. We need both.
- Tool Tips: They are helpful, no doubt about that, but some effort should go into making information available without using tool tips. There are some screens that are meant to give you the information with one look and you don't get it with one look through tool tips because you can only have one of them displayed at a time. The most glaring example of this is Civ4's financial advisor screen, because there is really enough empty space there to accommodate all the information contained in the tool tips.
- Report preferences: Reports in Civ4 are actually less customizable than in Civ2, Civ3 and SMAC. I can only hope that the interface designers take a careful look at all the games in the series and give the player as much freedom in deciding which reports are displayed and how as the gameplay allows. By the way, after four manuals telling me it's important to have a look at a city that has just grown to check whether the new population is working where I want it to be, I'm still waiting for the option to be taken automatically to a city that has just grown. Maybe Civ5 can help here.
Actually, it wasn't four manuals that gave that useful bit of advice, but just the first three ... which brings me to documentation. Now, I'm a realist. I know the old days of big boxes and physically big manuals won't come back. However there is no reason at all why the quality of the manual content has declined from game to game and should continue to do so. A few thoughts, most of them highly subjective, for the poor fellow who gets the "manual assignment":
- Writing the manual should not be beneath the ladies and gentlemen in charge of the project. The Civ1 manual was written by Mr Meier's second-in-command. It's descriptive, it's precise, it's almost comprehensive ... in fact, any guy who gets the manual assignment should be made to read the Civ1 manual and understand its structure before he is allowed to write a page himself.
- Use descriptive and avoid promotional language. The person who reads the manual has, I hope, already paid for the game. It's not the manual's job to make him feel like he is being talked to by a second-rate car dealer by droning about "incredible depth of play" and about the civilopedia being "incredibly helpful" (pages 4 and 6 of the Civ4 manual).
- Be precise and be correct. Avoid errors like: "If one unit has double the strength of the other, it has a 2:1 chance of obtaining victory" (page 36 of the Civ4 manual). The last time that was true was in 1991.
- Forget about "Advanced Rules". You create redundancies and make the game sound more complex than it is when you split up the rules in two sections like that. By the way, the ability to pick which tiles are work is one of the most fundamental keys to understanding how the game works. There is no reason for waiting till page 143 to tell the player that he can do that and even less reason for telling him that he should not to read page 143 until he has played "a couple of games" (page 134).
- Avoid too many headings on one page. In particular, do not use headings for each item on a list. Bold-printed words work just as well.
- Don't tell us it is beyond the scope of the manual to explain the game mechanics properly and comprehensively. If you need 3 pages to explain how to load and save a game (pages 15 - 17), countless pages for lists and pictures of items that people are better off looking up in the civilopedia anyway, while devoting all of three lines to the United Nations (p. 96), all of six lines to hurry options (p. 139), you can make better use of the space you are given.
None of these requests are as important as the gameplay, but both the interface and the documentation are something that can still be tweaked and improved during the next few months to make the game as accessible and enjoyable as it can be.
I'm sure others here will have more (and perhaps different) ideas and suggestions.
An area where minor, but important changes can still be made is, I hope, the game's interface and its documentation.
A few thoughts here:
- Medium Zoom: There should be a method of moving units effectively on a medium zoom level. Civ4's combining the zoom-out with tilting the map towards the classic top-down view is visually pleasing, but telling units apart when all you see is their heads is more difficult than it should be. I'm not sure whether the better solution is to forget about the tilt or to use old-style unit markers once you get to the top-down view or something else, but there is room for improvement here.
- World Map: There should be some way of looking the entire world map that makes use of the whole screen like the old F10 screen in Civ1. In Civ4, on round worlds even the maximum zoom does not give us the entire world and a lot of screen space is wasted on ... well ... space. The globe view is stunning of course, but not functional. We need both.
- Tool Tips: They are helpful, no doubt about that, but some effort should go into making information available without using tool tips. There are some screens that are meant to give you the information with one look and you don't get it with one look through tool tips because you can only have one of them displayed at a time. The most glaring example of this is Civ4's financial advisor screen, because there is really enough empty space there to accommodate all the information contained in the tool tips.
- Report preferences: Reports in Civ4 are actually less customizable than in Civ2, Civ3 and SMAC. I can only hope that the interface designers take a careful look at all the games in the series and give the player as much freedom in deciding which reports are displayed and how as the gameplay allows. By the way, after four manuals telling me it's important to have a look at a city that has just grown to check whether the new population is working where I want it to be, I'm still waiting for the option to be taken automatically to a city that has just grown. Maybe Civ5 can help here.
Actually, it wasn't four manuals that gave that useful bit of advice, but just the first three ... which brings me to documentation. Now, I'm a realist. I know the old days of big boxes and physically big manuals won't come back. However there is no reason at all why the quality of the manual content has declined from game to game and should continue to do so. A few thoughts, most of them highly subjective, for the poor fellow who gets the "manual assignment":
- Writing the manual should not be beneath the ladies and gentlemen in charge of the project. The Civ1 manual was written by Mr Meier's second-in-command. It's descriptive, it's precise, it's almost comprehensive ... in fact, any guy who gets the manual assignment should be made to read the Civ1 manual and understand its structure before he is allowed to write a page himself.
- Use descriptive and avoid promotional language. The person who reads the manual has, I hope, already paid for the game. It's not the manual's job to make him feel like he is being talked to by a second-rate car dealer by droning about "incredible depth of play" and about the civilopedia being "incredibly helpful" (pages 4 and 6 of the Civ4 manual).
- Be precise and be correct. Avoid errors like: "If one unit has double the strength of the other, it has a 2:1 chance of obtaining victory" (page 36 of the Civ4 manual). The last time that was true was in 1991.
- Forget about "Advanced Rules". You create redundancies and make the game sound more complex than it is when you split up the rules in two sections like that. By the way, the ability to pick which tiles are work is one of the most fundamental keys to understanding how the game works. There is no reason for waiting till page 143 to tell the player that he can do that and even less reason for telling him that he should not to read page 143 until he has played "a couple of games" (page 134).
- Avoid too many headings on one page. In particular, do not use headings for each item on a list. Bold-printed words work just as well.
- Don't tell us it is beyond the scope of the manual to explain the game mechanics properly and comprehensively. If you need 3 pages to explain how to load and save a game (pages 15 - 17), countless pages for lists and pictures of items that people are better off looking up in the civilopedia anyway, while devoting all of three lines to the United Nations (p. 96), all of six lines to hurry options (p. 139), you can make better use of the space you are given.
None of these requests are as important as the gameplay, but both the interface and the documentation are something that can still be tweaked and improved during the next few months to make the game as accessible and enjoyable as it can be.
I'm sure others here will have more (and perhaps different) ideas and suggestions.
