Txurce
Deity
So according to your definition, making something more efficient dumbs it down?
Is Civ 5 really "being dumbed down"?
- Thread starter hardcore_gamer
- Start date
So according to your definition, making something more efficient dumbs it down?
You see, every game should be like War in the Pacific, where it takes longer to finish the game than it did to finish the war it simulates.
Lol dude what are you on buddy.
Plug-in's for a game? Never heard of it. I have heard of plugins for software and some are free while others cost money.
And why would anyone charge you to fix a game? Is the game somehow broken without Babylon? Is the game broken without those additional maps or civs? I didn't think so. What you are referring to are PATCHES, they are still free as far as I know.
DLC's are additional content over and above what is included in the game, so why don't they have the right to charge you for them?
It is the same idea as expansion packs. Whether you talk about MMO's or strategy game etc. The purpose is to add additional content and charge you for it.
As far as pricing is concerned, it will very likely be fair if we compare to what other games charge for. I remember having LBP for PS3 and paid a couple of dollars for some additional skins ($4 or something).
I don't really care about tree saving myself and believe all these additional taxes we have to pay, such as carbon tax, is bs. But what I was getting at is how firaxis was advertising about their recyclable case and saving trees blah blah and that is why I made that comparison.
I find your reasoning quite weak. There is no need to get angry at this point. If the DLC pricing is reasonable it will make things more interesting and affordable for us all
Ever heard of KISS? Keep It Simple and Stupid. It's an Engineering principle that exactly captures the message here.
tom2050 sort of has a point, but really he's defining "dumbing down" more than he is defining streamlining or simplifying. To streamline or simplify something... I think it's fair to call that dumbing it down. The thing is, it doesn't mean the person using it is being dumbed down, but it seems the offense some people take is from a thought along those lines.
Having said that, one would usually expect that dumbing something down makes it easier for "dumber" people to use as well.
Not shure if this was said. You are wrong my friend. There has been DLC wich were expansion packs. It's just the way things are released now. Pretty soon, games will just be called DLC.
I agree completely. It's obvious from the new gameplay videos and streams we've been shown all the complexity is still there. Just smartly displayed with notifications and menus so your screen isnt constantly cluttered. This, people, is improvement.
I guess my problem is, I am on nothing. Plain boring Davor.
This was 8-10 years ago. Ever play Morrowind on the PC. How about Star Wars of the Knights Republic on the console? In those days they gave out extra stuff for free. Small stuff, just like DLC. As for KotoR, it was one thing the Yavin plug in.
Yes free for now, but for how long? 5 years? 10 years? Keep reading what people say, what the devolpers say. Making patches cost money. Why would they keep patching a game if they are not making any money? Besides Blizzard with Diablo II and Firaxis with Civ IV, name another company that keeps making patches for games. I bet you can't name many. Look at Activision games, they get 2 patches for a game, and that's it most times. Call to Power 2, for example. MOO3 for another example from Atari. 2 patches and the companies say the game is set to play.
Now look here, patches is an accepted practice now. So I can see now the future, will be, make a patch, company will say the game is fixed, and since they are not making any money on patches, next time they "fix" something it will be incorperated into a DLC content. If I was correct on how this industry would work in how eveyone accpets play now, patch later concept, I can be correct again.
2K only wants to make money. If more money is to be made, then you can be well shure that DLC will sooner or later "fix" games as well.
DLC's are additional content over and above what is included in the game, so why don't they have the right to charge you for them? I am saying this could happen. I was correct when I said all companies will release games and patch later, and I was mocked saying this would never happen. Well it has happened as you are aware.
I hope this is the case, that will make it bearable in the short term to buy, but I would feel sorry for someone who buys the game a year late and then wants to buy all that DLC all at once. I bet this person would be saying it would have been better if they put it all in an expansion pack. Good for company, bad for us. I do not want to see $10 for once civ. That is like 1/5th cost of the game for only one race, and 2 unique units and 1 building.
I agree, that is for another discussion.
I am not angry. I just am not good with my words when I type them out. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed.
You have it all backwards. The tiles being worth less means that every tile is MORE valuable than in civ 4. Each tile will have to be taken into consideration (a lot more tiles per city than civ 4 by the way) to maximize cities. I think this is going to be a good dynamic to the game.
lemmy101
Emperor
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If you take stuff out, people always say it has been 'dumbed down' but this just isn't the case. Sometimes less is more and in every case I feel they have only strengthened the core game for hardcore and casual people.
Sliders removed - Sliders were stupid. It took removing them to make me realise this however. Now if you need more money, you improve your economy. If you want to improve your culture, you build more culture buildings. Same could be said for Civ 4 but with the slider it encouraged you just shifting focus from turn to turn depending on what you needed most. Removing the sliders has actually deepened the strategy since if you're losing money then you must address this problem at it's source, and risk damaging production, population, military and science when you start ripping up the landscape and disbanding units to get your economy back on track.
Global happiness - Deepens the game again. No longer can you just leave cities at their unhappiness limit, and no longer will unhappiness just damage that one city. They've made happiness problems have an effect that cripples growth of your entire empire, forcing happiness into being as being as important as money or culture.
Removal of distance from palace / overseas maintenance - Deepens the game. Frees up your city placement and civilization size to be purely based on strategy and not on a rigidly set optimal city count to have a chance of competing in the tech tree. With the awesome social policies, small and huge empires are now both just as strategically valid.
Religion - deepens diplomacy and allows you to concentrate on early techs purely on what they provide instead of being forced to go for a tech or avoid techs purely because of the religion they provide.
Tech/map trading - Gets rid of the ability to just beeline a tech and then make up all the cheap techs with tech trading. Deepens the strategy of choosing techs since the only way to get them (choose them, if you discount ruins / research agreements) is to invest the time in them sooner or later. With maps it means you can let one civ in your borders yet be sure another has no idea about the inside of your empire. Also makes scouting the world a much higher priority where before you could just fill in the entire map as soon as paper came along.
Everything they removed they did so to provide more depths and choice in what remains. With the inclusion of deep tactical combat system this is the deepest Civ yet. Just because it appears simple this is generally due to a much more accessible UI and streamlining of the micromanagement. You still have all the control you always had down to tile level, and in terms of the things they removed, less is more sometimes. There's still plenty of scope for number crunching and the social policy stuff provides more strategy than the civics ever did.
Also, they have made modding the forefront of this game. In the same way as the decision to not invest time in scenarios and spending that time on improving the mod tools and making mods more accessible to the general mainstream audiences, I feel happy that they have boiled down Civ to its roots and developed the depth up from those core elements. The removal for religion and espionage, for example, paves the way for any amount of modders to try their hands at their own visions of those systems. In Civ 4 there was so many distinct systems that any mods that added new ones tended to over complicate things by providing too much the player had to deal with per turn. I think the freedom the modders will have on this game will mean we'll see a lot more interesting game systems as mod options.
Sliders removed - Sliders were stupid. It took removing them to make me realise this however. Now if you need more money, you improve your economy. If you want to improve your culture, you build more culture buildings. Same could be said for Civ 4 but with the slider it encouraged you just shifting focus from turn to turn depending on what you needed most. Removing the sliders has actually deepened the strategy since if you're losing money then you must address this problem at it's source, and risk damaging production, population, military and science when you start ripping up the landscape and disbanding units to get your economy back on track.
Global happiness - Deepens the game again. No longer can you just leave cities at their unhappiness limit, and no longer will unhappiness just damage that one city. They've made happiness problems have an effect that cripples growth of your entire empire, forcing happiness into being as being as important as money or culture.
Removal of distance from palace / overseas maintenance - Deepens the game. Frees up your city placement and civilization size to be purely based on strategy and not on a rigidly set optimal city count to have a chance of competing in the tech tree. With the awesome social policies, small and huge empires are now both just as strategically valid.
Religion - deepens diplomacy and allows you to concentrate on early techs purely on what they provide instead of being forced to go for a tech or avoid techs purely because of the religion they provide.
Tech/map trading - Gets rid of the ability to just beeline a tech and then make up all the cheap techs with tech trading. Deepens the strategy of choosing techs since the only way to get them (choose them, if you discount ruins / research agreements) is to invest the time in them sooner or later. With maps it means you can let one civ in your borders yet be sure another has no idea about the inside of your empire. Also makes scouting the world a much higher priority where before you could just fill in the entire map as soon as paper came along.
Everything they removed they did so to provide more depths and choice in what remains. With the inclusion of deep tactical combat system this is the deepest Civ yet. Just because it appears simple this is generally due to a much more accessible UI and streamlining of the micromanagement. You still have all the control you always had down to tile level, and in terms of the things they removed, less is more sometimes. There's still plenty of scope for number crunching and the social policy stuff provides more strategy than the civics ever did.
Also, they have made modding the forefront of this game. In the same way as the decision to not invest time in scenarios and spending that time on improving the mod tools and making mods more accessible to the general mainstream audiences, I feel happy that they have boiled down Civ to its roots and developed the depth up from those core elements. The removal for religion and espionage, for example, paves the way for any amount of modders to try their hands at their own visions of those systems. In Civ 4 there was so many distinct systems that any mods that added new ones tended to over complicate things by providing too much the player had to deal with per turn. I think the freedom the modders will have on this game will mean we'll see a lot more interesting game systems as mod options.
tom2050
Deity
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Efficiency (Program does everything for you) and simplification on the surface.. perhaps more complex coding under the hood in certain areas. But yes, efficient and simple; so that way even Grandma (and mainstream players) can play it.
Of course, Grandma might not like the tedium of moving lots of individual 1upt units in the endgame, which may give Grandma finger cramps.
Yes, in a way for a game which you are supposed to manage your whole empire, it could be considered dumbing it down, to make it easier for even players that play only FPS games to enjoy. I'm just glad they stayed on the macro/micro middle ground.
Sliders are not stupid. You need more money build more money buildings? WTF? We had to do this in Civ IV and III and II and I. With sliders, you had to decide do I want more money, or do I want more research. Oh wait, my civilians are not happy, do I have less science and money to make them more happy?
Oh if I built more happy buildings, then I can put my sliders up so I can have more science and money. Now this choice is gone.
Right now, it seems like a dumb down move, so people don't have to think about that.
lemmy101
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No of course they have to think about that. But instead of idly clicking a + or a - to sort it out, they have to make more real game changing and far reaching decisions with real consequences that span more than a moment of one turn if they get it wrong: "Shall I spend money and rush some theatres for culture so I can get that social policy earlier? Should I buy that tile even though I've not got much cash as I really need that luxury resource? Should I dig up some of my farms and build trading posts?"
Are you telling me that's 'dumbed down' compared to: "Shall I put science to 80%? Shall I put culture to 30%?"
Seriously?
I think you'll find, if you really think about it, that if Civ 1 - 4 DIDN'T have sliders, and they introduced sliders in Civ 5, people would be saying they had dumbed it down:
"Now if I'm in negative money all I have to do is lower my science slider by 10%???!?!?? GRR THEY'VE DUMBED IT DOWN!"
"Now if my civ is unhappy, all I have to do is increase a 'culture slider' by 10%???!?!?!?! BAH THEY'VE DUMBED IT DOWN EVEN MORE!"
In this case, though, people would have a point.
tom2050
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Well, see right here... the game civilization is about controlling your whole empire.. it's players with your thought that want to make the game so it plays itself and you make very few decisions which you then tack on the word strategic to.
If you don't want to think about more than 1 thing at once and cannot multi-task your own thoughts, then why do you even play civilization?
If you want Only Strategic decisions, then try a game of chess. Oh wait, the slider could be seen as strategy, because a player properly using it will fare far better than one who does not.
RD-BH
Human
1) The 1upt and hexes are a good move toward more strategic warfare.
... ... The rest of the game seems overly simplified.
2) Reading the manual did not make the game look strategically complex.
... ... I'll have to play it to appreciate its true strategic complexity.
3) It looks like Civ V's complexity is comparable to vanilla Civ IV.
... ... IMO This makes it a good introduction to the changes in this series.
... ... Again, I want to see how it plays.
Conclusion:
... Complexity? That is what expansions are for.
... ... The rest of the game seems overly simplified.
2) Reading the manual did not make the game look strategically complex.
... ... I'll have to play it to appreciate its true strategic complexity.
3) It looks like Civ V's complexity is comparable to vanilla Civ IV.
... ... IMO This makes it a good introduction to the changes in this series.
... ... Again, I want to see how it plays.
Conclusion:
... Complexity? That is what expansions are for.
I don't think it's a good definition of strategy. Strategy is planning ahead and making right decisions, not every case of exploiting something to your advantage can be called strategy.
Also I didn't say that I want to make "very few" decisions, for example during a war I'll have to make many decisions (especially with 1upt), like where to move, attack, and so on, and I like it because all of them will be important and "strategic" in my view. Manipulating a slider is tedious and not fun, and also, as lemmy101 pointed out, in some cases it removes the "planning ahead" factor, as you can offset your past decisions whether to specialize in gold or science or something by changing a slider.
tom2050
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Of course a slider can be considered strategy... look up the definition. If you find the Civ 4 slider tedious, then you must think classics like SMAC is just an atrocious atrocity.
Regardless, it sounds like you want a mostly macromanagement game, which is not what the series is; and I hope it doesn't go. Console FPS game players would agree with your views of mostly macromanagement.
It is these kind of overly-macro views, that I hope Firaxis doesn't pay attention to; otherwise we will end up with something that is not civilization down the road.
Regardless, it sounds like you want a mostly macromanagement game, which is not what the series is; and I hope it doesn't go. Console FPS game players would agree with your views of mostly macromanagement.
It is these kind of overly-macro views, that I hope Firaxis doesn't pay attention to; otherwise we will end up with something that is not civilization down the road.
I don't want a game like CivRev, I like what I see about Civ5 so far. There is some micromanagement (like managing the citizens in cities), but leaving it as it is (so the AI can handle it) shouldn't give very bad results, with sliders you can't do it. So my expectations are close to where Civ5 is, and I hope you won't call it "something that is not civilization".
Btw I played SMAC and enjoyed it, but I think Civ5 will be closer to perfection than it.
Btw I played SMAC and enjoyed it, but I think Civ5 will be closer to perfection than it.
RD-BH
Human
Perfection? The Civ V manual doesn't even mention supply crawlers ...
... How can it be closer?
Maybe if it had 'Isle of the Deep' instead of 'Ninja Dinosaur' ...
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