Is a Civ4 modern successor possible?
- Thread starter Marla_Singer
- Start date
drewisfat
King
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2011
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Let me tell you a story and you can decide for yourself how true the narrative is.
Sid Meier pioneered a genre called 4x with the philosophy of maximizing "interesting decisions" the player is faced with. Interesting means two things here: not obvious and impactful.
To achieve this, mechanics are designed with the AI in mind. By this I mean that there is a relatively simple "hack" you can code AI behavior with to be passable, but the upper bound of human optimization is quite high. Worker tile management is the strongest example. It's relatively simple to tell the AI to farm enough tiles to the happy cap, build mines on hills and cottage everywhere else. Cleverly this can serve a double purpose, and the same code can allow new players to automate their workers entirely while they get a handle on the rest of the game. Meanwhile for experienced players the upper bound on efficient worker micro is endless. Even if you know what improvement you want on which tile, having to use workers makes it interesting. Even with just an opportunity cost the player must decide how many workers to build, whether chops to rush are more important than improvements, conserving worker turns based on terrain and the next planned improvement, will the city's borders pop, will extra population just be whipped away and the tile improvement can be delayed, is it worth growing due to happy/health caps, is it physically safe for the worker from enemy units, etc., etc. In other words, there is emergent complexity with tile management and every other system in the game and workers act as the bridge between the different systems. The genius didn't come overnight. Mechanics are built on each other and each iteration of the game keeps the good and experiments with the bad.
Other would-be competitors see no entrance into this market due to the expertise required for such an ambitious project. Firaxis could look bad on earlier entries in the series and the existing playerbase, while competitors would have to struggle to copy but not copy the core ideas. The barrier to entry was too high and the expected return too low - at best they could hope to mimic Firaxis and even that was a big gamble.
But as the series carried on Sid took a step back, the company was sold to a bigger company, designers came and went, and most damningly of all: this was no longer a game taking input from good players. Sulla was removed from the room.
As a result Civ V saw a catastrophic drop in interesting decisions. Instead of innovating in areas that need improvement (modern naval/air warfare, espionage, corporations, etc.) they reinvented the wheel. They broke the strongest parts of Civ IV (combat and diplomacy), changed civics to a weaker system in policy trees, and due to changing squares to hexes, they had to remove the entire cultural system from the game. On release the game had no religion, and the meta was to expand as densely as possible - only to dramatically reverse course later as social policies made 4-city empires busted. Tile yields and by extension worker micro matter much less because the production side of the game had to be gutted to prevent too many units cramming up the map. Neither the AI nor the player feels much like expanding..... in a 4X game.... I recommend reading Sulla's website for a more thorough takedown.
This fundamentally changed the civ player base. This is where apologists start their spin. Yes, *some* people didn't move from III to IV. No game is *perfect* on release, and I'm sure somewhere there's a holdout who thought Civ II was blasphemy. The lie here is in the magnitude and the type of player that didn't move on. No high level civ IV players moved onto V. Nada, zippo, zilch. BiC did a great post comparing the ratio of S&T to General Discussion comments on the forums in the different games. Look at those numbers yourself: strategic discussion clearly peaked in IV. Very similar trend with "Hall of Fame" discussion, which I believe Firaxis essentially discontinued because cheat detection isn't compatible with VI. Not my cup of tea, but I'm sure that personally hurt the moderators on here who are otherwise pretty positive with their public-facing comments. At the end of the day, 2K does not care if they lose ~10% of an existing player base but increase the overall pool of new players. That's a financial win for them of course. But if that 10% dropoff is primarily coming from expert players, that means the quality of the series has absolutely no chance in recovering - the expertise is gone. Not only is the expertise gone but the type of player has changed. New players bemoan "tedious micro" and "min/maxing" and talk about tall vs wide. The game's huge drop in difficulty made way for streamers, who by their nature are more social beasts than serious gamers. It turns out sandbox difficulty is great for meme material.
Vox Populi comes out with significant improvements that salvage V and improve the difficulty by at least a level. Still nowhere near IV, and most IV veterans do not then move onto VP. But there are people who started with V, got good at it, and were very happy that VP extended the difficulty and thus the life of the game.
Civ VI comes out and instead of a more modest drop off in difficulty between VI and V, it's a significant drop in difficulty between VI and Vox Populi. Furthermore, Firaxis has now learned that they can just ignore AI and eventually the community will do the hard work for them. Since they broke the AI's ability to fight in V it's fitting that they break it more economically in VI. Instead of using relatively simple tile prioritization rules that had carried the AI so far, they decide to gut workers further and innovate with "districts" - a system with a much lower optimization cap for the human, but one in which the AI struggles immensely as micro goes all the way back to where you settle the city or which wonders you build. And that's what we got with adjacencies. This causes yet again the veterans of V to reject VI as it's now 1-2 difficulty levels easier than VP. The player base is even less discerning - which sadly, is great news for Firaxis! They can now charge money for obvious filler material. Even worse than filler though, I would say all the weather nonsense inherently hurts the civ series. First off, climate change isn't interesting in a FFA game. Existential crisis for humanity, sure, but in a zero-sum FFA game the right choice is always to burn the world and rule over the ashes. Hurricans, floods, monsoons, tornadoes..... all of this toxic to decision making. There's a reason we turn off events in civ IV. It's because a volcano blowing up all your cottages isn't interesting - it's the death of planning. Emphasis on pretty pictures and feature bloat over all else.
Competitors take notice. Prior to this, the 4x market seemed closed off to them. There was already a flagship product, and a huge amount of expertise went into making a good game. But Firaxis proved with V and VI the financial feasibility of a non-strategic strategy game and the vultures came in to feast. Unfortunately these competitors are terrible. Paradox games are by their nature not about interesting choices or difficulty or game balance but about map painting. It's great, but it's sandbox by design and their DLC system feels exploitative. Humankind unbound by the "1 civ test of time rule" innovates with civ switching.... yay! Old World is made by Soren Johnson designer of Civ IV...... but Soren is not our savior. He didn't try to make a new Civ IV. Civ IV veterans turn off huts and events as a general rule and have been doing so for a long time. It would be hard for him to miss it if he was even casually lurking here. At first you might just think it's because barb events were unbalanced, and they sure were. The thing is *all* the events are bad. Random slave revolt costing you the game, obvious bad. But so too is a free truce to a war based on plane crash luck. Why would I bribe AIs into war if their war could be suddenly abrogated from such a dice roll? Why should I be saved by such a dice roll if the war is on me? The free health bonus largely unbalances health resources which already felt less important than happy resources. The events that buff your army are generally worthless, but amazingly OP if that's what you were going for anyway. What kind of option is axe rush and either win or lose the game based on that event firing? No event is good, they only range in their harm. And what did Soren do? He ignored his natural fan base and doubled down on making event-driven gameplay central to OW. I don't know if that's ignorance or ego, but it's awful. Capping worker actions with charges imposes a skill ceiling for no reason. Soren isn't my favorite Civ designer: Jon is. Jon admitted his mistakes and that's worth something to me at least.
Civ VII comes out and you all know the story by now. Theystole independently developed years ago, the key feature of civ switching that ruined Humankind. Again, is this ignorance or ego? Either way it's insane. I care about it because civ switching is going to be incredibly artificial, gamey and the AI is going to be horrible at it compared to a player. I get that Firaxis doesn't care about that at this point, but you'd think they at least care about their modern fanbase many of whom are just philosophically going to be turned off by civ switching. The negative trend continues, now not only does this game need to be ported to consoles, but we need virtual reality apparently. Workers after being hurt in V, gutted in VI are now literally removed in VII. Gone is the main vessel of micro in the series, a dark symbolic moment for me. The game is something entirely else now, more of a sit back and watch the simulation type game where you're just adjusting the flavor in which your victory appears. Of course even then you're railroaded by overpowered uniques. See this is *really* their motivation behind civ switching - to triple the playable uniques. Without difficulty, replayability tanks - so to add more replayability they make each civ/leader very different from the other so even if you win easily you might want to play every leader a couple times..... and this blends really great into a DLC model charging you for the privilege to play a few new leaders.
The common top-down view of old hats not liking the new game, is that this is the civ cycle. But look at it from the side and it's really Civ's downward spiral. With each iteration the depth and difficulty of the series plunge, and the remaining group of players cares less and less about it. Judging from VII's top difficulty being absolutely crushed by some players on release, I'd say we're somewhere in Prince-Monarch range in Civ IV terms. That's how far it's slid. I get that many will be turned off by hater rants on games, especially at a time in the world when there are more serious problems.... but for a lot of us games are just such an escape from reality. I can respect that people want different things from different games. I have thousands of hours in Skyrim and it's certainly not for its depth or difficulty. But those goals seemed natural to want in a 4x strategy game supposedly designed around "interesting decisions". If this isn't our home, where is? The entire single player strategy game genre has been going backwards for over a decade. It's incredibly frustrating that the best game released in my adult life is FTL or something. On the one hand, I do want Firaxis to fail: I simply see no future with them at the helm. But I don't see a competitor willing (nonetheless able) to pick up the reins. And I don't think Firaxis will fail. The steam review tanking is from an unfinished UI. When lines literally don't line up, every type of gamer sees the problem and knows the game is unfinished. Otherwise I can't parse VII's steam rating with V, which was materially at least as bad at launch. Steam ratings are only from people who buy the game. Most of the people who understand the problems with modern civ aren't going to hand over more money to Firaxis just to voice their anger on Steam. The haters self-filter with each iteration as depth/difficulty drop. This is the real sin of Civ V - there's no room to reverse course because the player base has changed. If fighting the AI was hard again they figure they'd lose more players than they regain and they're probably right. From that perspective, the genre is doomed. Remasters are cheap ways to cash in on a legacy series, but they wouldn't really work with civ IV. Generally remasters are just new graphics, and the people they'd try to appeal to with this remaster are harder to please and don't care about graphics. Hope I'm wrong but I don't think it makes financial sense. I'd say keep an eye out for clever indie games in the broader strategy genre, and in the meantime let's do our best to make Civ IV eternal.
Sid Meier pioneered a genre called 4x with the philosophy of maximizing "interesting decisions" the player is faced with. Interesting means two things here: not obvious and impactful.
To achieve this, mechanics are designed with the AI in mind. By this I mean that there is a relatively simple "hack" you can code AI behavior with to be passable, but the upper bound of human optimization is quite high. Worker tile management is the strongest example. It's relatively simple to tell the AI to farm enough tiles to the happy cap, build mines on hills and cottage everywhere else. Cleverly this can serve a double purpose, and the same code can allow new players to automate their workers entirely while they get a handle on the rest of the game. Meanwhile for experienced players the upper bound on efficient worker micro is endless. Even if you know what improvement you want on which tile, having to use workers makes it interesting. Even with just an opportunity cost the player must decide how many workers to build, whether chops to rush are more important than improvements, conserving worker turns based on terrain and the next planned improvement, will the city's borders pop, will extra population just be whipped away and the tile improvement can be delayed, is it worth growing due to happy/health caps, is it physically safe for the worker from enemy units, etc., etc. In other words, there is emergent complexity with tile management and every other system in the game and workers act as the bridge between the different systems. The genius didn't come overnight. Mechanics are built on each other and each iteration of the game keeps the good and experiments with the bad.
Other would-be competitors see no entrance into this market due to the expertise required for such an ambitious project. Firaxis could look bad on earlier entries in the series and the existing playerbase, while competitors would have to struggle to copy but not copy the core ideas. The barrier to entry was too high and the expected return too low - at best they could hope to mimic Firaxis and even that was a big gamble.
But as the series carried on Sid took a step back, the company was sold to a bigger company, designers came and went, and most damningly of all: this was no longer a game taking input from good players. Sulla was removed from the room.
As a result Civ V saw a catastrophic drop in interesting decisions. Instead of innovating in areas that need improvement (modern naval/air warfare, espionage, corporations, etc.) they reinvented the wheel. They broke the strongest parts of Civ IV (combat and diplomacy), changed civics to a weaker system in policy trees, and due to changing squares to hexes, they had to remove the entire cultural system from the game. On release the game had no religion, and the meta was to expand as densely as possible - only to dramatically reverse course later as social policies made 4-city empires busted. Tile yields and by extension worker micro matter much less because the production side of the game had to be gutted to prevent too many units cramming up the map. Neither the AI nor the player feels much like expanding..... in a 4X game.... I recommend reading Sulla's website for a more thorough takedown.
This fundamentally changed the civ player base. This is where apologists start their spin. Yes, *some* people didn't move from III to IV. No game is *perfect* on release, and I'm sure somewhere there's a holdout who thought Civ II was blasphemy. The lie here is in the magnitude and the type of player that didn't move on. No high level civ IV players moved onto V. Nada, zippo, zilch. BiC did a great post comparing the ratio of S&T to General Discussion comments on the forums in the different games. Look at those numbers yourself: strategic discussion clearly peaked in IV. Very similar trend with "Hall of Fame" discussion, which I believe Firaxis essentially discontinued because cheat detection isn't compatible with VI. Not my cup of tea, but I'm sure that personally hurt the moderators on here who are otherwise pretty positive with their public-facing comments. At the end of the day, 2K does not care if they lose ~10% of an existing player base but increase the overall pool of new players. That's a financial win for them of course. But if that 10% dropoff is primarily coming from expert players, that means the quality of the series has absolutely no chance in recovering - the expertise is gone. Not only is the expertise gone but the type of player has changed. New players bemoan "tedious micro" and "min/maxing" and talk about tall vs wide. The game's huge drop in difficulty made way for streamers, who by their nature are more social beasts than serious gamers. It turns out sandbox difficulty is great for meme material.
Vox Populi comes out with significant improvements that salvage V and improve the difficulty by at least a level. Still nowhere near IV, and most IV veterans do not then move onto VP. But there are people who started with V, got good at it, and were very happy that VP extended the difficulty and thus the life of the game.
Civ VI comes out and instead of a more modest drop off in difficulty between VI and V, it's a significant drop in difficulty between VI and Vox Populi. Furthermore, Firaxis has now learned that they can just ignore AI and eventually the community will do the hard work for them. Since they broke the AI's ability to fight in V it's fitting that they break it more economically in VI. Instead of using relatively simple tile prioritization rules that had carried the AI so far, they decide to gut workers further and innovate with "districts" - a system with a much lower optimization cap for the human, but one in which the AI struggles immensely as micro goes all the way back to where you settle the city or which wonders you build. And that's what we got with adjacencies. This causes yet again the veterans of V to reject VI as it's now 1-2 difficulty levels easier than VP. The player base is even less discerning - which sadly, is great news for Firaxis! They can now charge money for obvious filler material. Even worse than filler though, I would say all the weather nonsense inherently hurts the civ series. First off, climate change isn't interesting in a FFA game. Existential crisis for humanity, sure, but in a zero-sum FFA game the right choice is always to burn the world and rule over the ashes. Hurricans, floods, monsoons, tornadoes..... all of this toxic to decision making. There's a reason we turn off events in civ IV. It's because a volcano blowing up all your cottages isn't interesting - it's the death of planning. Emphasis on pretty pictures and feature bloat over all else.
Competitors take notice. Prior to this, the 4x market seemed closed off to them. There was already a flagship product, and a huge amount of expertise went into making a good game. But Firaxis proved with V and VI the financial feasibility of a non-strategic strategy game and the vultures came in to feast. Unfortunately these competitors are terrible. Paradox games are by their nature not about interesting choices or difficulty or game balance but about map painting. It's great, but it's sandbox by design and their DLC system feels exploitative. Humankind unbound by the "1 civ test of time rule" innovates with civ switching.... yay! Old World is made by Soren Johnson designer of Civ IV...... but Soren is not our savior. He didn't try to make a new Civ IV. Civ IV veterans turn off huts and events as a general rule and have been doing so for a long time. It would be hard for him to miss it if he was even casually lurking here. At first you might just think it's because barb events were unbalanced, and they sure were. The thing is *all* the events are bad. Random slave revolt costing you the game, obvious bad. But so too is a free truce to a war based on plane crash luck. Why would I bribe AIs into war if their war could be suddenly abrogated from such a dice roll? Why should I be saved by such a dice roll if the war is on me? The free health bonus largely unbalances health resources which already felt less important than happy resources. The events that buff your army are generally worthless, but amazingly OP if that's what you were going for anyway. What kind of option is axe rush and either win or lose the game based on that event firing? No event is good, they only range in their harm. And what did Soren do? He ignored his natural fan base and doubled down on making event-driven gameplay central to OW. I don't know if that's ignorance or ego, but it's awful. Capping worker actions with charges imposes a skill ceiling for no reason. Soren isn't my favorite Civ designer: Jon is. Jon admitted his mistakes and that's worth something to me at least.
Civ VII comes out and you all know the story by now. They
The common top-down view of old hats not liking the new game, is that this is the civ cycle. But look at it from the side and it's really Civ's downward spiral. With each iteration the depth and difficulty of the series plunge, and the remaining group of players cares less and less about it. Judging from VII's top difficulty being absolutely crushed by some players on release, I'd say we're somewhere in Prince-Monarch range in Civ IV terms. That's how far it's slid. I get that many will be turned off by hater rants on games, especially at a time in the world when there are more serious problems.... but for a lot of us games are just such an escape from reality. I can respect that people want different things from different games. I have thousands of hours in Skyrim and it's certainly not for its depth or difficulty. But those goals seemed natural to want in a 4x strategy game supposedly designed around "interesting decisions". If this isn't our home, where is? The entire single player strategy game genre has been going backwards for over a decade. It's incredibly frustrating that the best game released in my adult life is FTL or something. On the one hand, I do want Firaxis to fail: I simply see no future with them at the helm. But I don't see a competitor willing (nonetheless able) to pick up the reins. And I don't think Firaxis will fail. The steam review tanking is from an unfinished UI. When lines literally don't line up, every type of gamer sees the problem and knows the game is unfinished. Otherwise I can't parse VII's steam rating with V, which was materially at least as bad at launch. Steam ratings are only from people who buy the game. Most of the people who understand the problems with modern civ aren't going to hand over more money to Firaxis just to voice their anger on Steam. The haters self-filter with each iteration as depth/difficulty drop. This is the real sin of Civ V - there's no room to reverse course because the player base has changed. If fighting the AI was hard again they figure they'd lose more players than they regain and they're probably right. From that perspective, the genre is doomed. Remasters are cheap ways to cash in on a legacy series, but they wouldn't really work with civ IV. Generally remasters are just new graphics, and the people they'd try to appeal to with this remaster are harder to please and don't care about graphics. Hope I'm wrong but I don't think it makes financial sense. I'd say keep an eye out for clever indie games in the broader strategy genre, and in the meantime let's do our best to make Civ IV eternal.
Slaughter
Initiate
On Remasters: I would say they're easy money nowadays, not making one is like leaving money at the table. Remember, a modern game takes 4-6 years to make on average. With a Remaster, the game already exists and is ready, you just need to:
- Make it compatible with modern systems and hardware
- Fix bugs
- Remaster assets for modern-day graphics and resolutions
This makes it look easier than it is, of course, but my point is that you don't need to design and make a game. Its already designed and made for you, you just need to build from there.
Remastered games even come with their own in-built fanbase!
It's a bit complicated to compare 4X and GSG, because 4X as a rule are meant to be symmetrical start strategy games. Meanwhile, GSGs are asymmetric by nature.
You forgot a competitor: Field of Glory: Empires. Probably the best strategy game the year it was launched.
I think the problem of events is that they're random things happening with no precedent nor warning. They're not systematic.
- Make it compatible with modern systems and hardware
- Fix bugs
- Remaster assets for modern-day graphics and resolutions
This makes it look easier than it is, of course, but my point is that you don't need to design and make a game. Its already designed and made for you, you just need to build from there.
Remastered games even come with their own in-built fanbase!
I think this is a simplistic view of Paradox GSG games, even if the newer games have issues.
It's a bit complicated to compare 4X and GSG, because 4X as a rule are meant to be symmetrical start strategy games. Meanwhile, GSGs are asymmetric by nature.
You forgot a competitor: Field of Glory: Empires. Probably the best strategy game the year it was launched.
It could be argued this is more of a problem with event design than with the concept of events themselves, and that planning for the unplanned is a part of planning.
I think the problem of events is that they're random things happening with no precedent nor warning. They're not systematic.
