Is Civ a Narrative Game?

[GeneralZIft]

From what I've seen and heard, the available cards depends on what you've done in the age. Still, there seem to be around 6 options for just 1 slots in the first stage. But the slots apparently increase over time (2 then 3 then 4?). It seems easy to choose 1 or 2 cards that don't affect you much. But I assume at some point you really have to put in cards that you really aren't prepared for. It would also be good to know what happens when you run out of money in civ vii, as this seems to be likely to happen in a crisis. Are you troops disbanding? Are buildings destroyed? Cities spawn hostile units?

Spoiler example screenshot :

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Good in theory but I saw Spiff just admit that he picked two that had NO impact on his Civ. I mean Bandits for example, just don't trade. The other one was the upkeep for a Civ that has no upkeep.

 

[Krikkit1]

Good in theory but I saw Spiff just admit that he picked two that had NO impact on his Civ. I mean Bandits for example, just don't trade. The other one was the upkeep for a Civ that has no upkeep.

Well those do limit what you can go in with…and the crisis seems more than just those policies. (you also have to deal with a plague / invasion /mass rebelliousness) The question is if those policies have lasting effects. Perhaps they are permanent or will take effort to remove, continuing to hamper you in the next age.

 

[Siptah]

Good in theory but I saw Spiff just admit that he picked two that had NO impact on his Civ. I mean Bandits for example, just don't trade. The other one was the upkeep for a Civ that has no upkeep.

Yes, I can see how you can always choose 1 or 2 that don't hurt. But I imagine that this is one of the areas that are very much WIP and the crisis will eventually punish you in some way (although I doubt that they will go too harsh, it's a civ game after all). At least, it would be easy to mod the cards to have multiple effects.

 

[user330977]

I think it’s disingenuous to say that having a forced narrative event is bad game design. If it were, there wouldn’t be bosses at the ends of levels.

I didn't say just the forced narrative event - the fact the game hobbles you without (apparently) any way around it is bad game design. It would be like having a boss at the end of a shooting game's level (which is fine) but then forcing you to choose between giving up half of your weapons or giving the boss double health points (which isn't).
Bosses exist as skill tests in games, a kind of obstacle to overcome before tougher levels and enemies appear. This doesn't seem the case here. It's just something bad happening for the sake of it.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

This sounds like abysmal game design. The game forces you to go through an arbitrary bad event and also arbitrarily hobbles your ability to get through it. Can the developers really not think of any other way to provide challenge?

The player's ability to hobble through the crisis is not arbitrary since the player picks how they are hindered. And lots of games have a final boss to overcome at the end of the level. So giving the player an endgame challenge is not bad game design itself. Of course, it depends on how it is implemented. It could be that the crises become repetitive and too easy for the human player to prepare for in which case it will fail as game design. But if the crises are interesting and present the right challenge to shake things up without being unfair to the player, then I would say it is good game design. The fact is that in previous civ games, there is often a snowball effect where the human player gets stronger and stronger and there is no challenge. Stats show that most players don't finish a civ6 game because thy lose interest from lack of challenge. I think giving the player a challenge at the end of an era makes logical sense. Again, let's see how it actually plays it out to see if it works or not.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I didn't say just the forced narrative event - the fact the game hobbles you without (apparently) any way around it is bad game design. It would be like having a boss at the end of a shooting game's level (which is fine) but then forcing you to choose between giving up half of your weapons or giving the boss double health points (which isn't).
Bosses exist as skill tests in games, a kind of obstacle to overcome before tougher levels and enemies appear. This doesn't seem the case here. It's just something bad happening for the sake of it.

As I mentioned before, if the game does not hinder you in some way, then the crisis would probably not be meaningful since it would be easy to overcome. For example, if I am snowballing in a domination victory and I have the biggest strongest military, having a barbarian crisis won't mean much because my military can easily stop them. To make a meaningful threat, you could make the barbarian invasion really strong. But remember that the crisis is for everybody, so a super massive barbarian invasion strong enough to threaten me would absolutely wipe out the lesser civs that are less powerful than me. And my big military would likely still survive the onslaught. So Firaxis has gone for a reasonable crisis but giving each player a chance to pick their weakness. And I think the negative policy cards are meant to simulate the decline of empires. Rome fail not just because there was a barbarian crisis at its border but because it was declining economically, socially and politically and thus weakened when the crisis hit. That is what the game is trying to represent by presenting a crisis and also giving you penalties to represent your decline. Also remember that the crisis in the game happens gradually. So it will start small and get worse as you reach the end of the era. So the player can prepare. It is not just some out of the blue unfair negative event that hits the player all at once.

 

[bladex1200]

Good narratives emerge organically through satisfying mechanics and enjoyable gameplay. Nothing should feel forced - things should happen in game because of choices made by the player or opponents. In a Civ context, this could be the rise of a handful of empires, but only a couple have access to iron and horses. They destroy the weaker civs, themselves growing much larger, until all-out conflict between these powers breaks out. One civ has access to more gold and silver mines, boosting their economy and allowing for a larger army, eventually allowing them to conquer the continent. They then sail away to different continents and the story develops from there.
Games shouldn't beat you over the head with THIS IS A NARRATIVE EVENT and force something to happen. The forced switching of eras for all civs is a fine example of forced gameplay. In my example, the victorious civs with horses and iron will use their new land and cities to grow more powerful, leaving the defeated civs to wither as insignificant backwaters. It's organic and much more immersive in my view.

This is the exact situation of snowballing that the civ devs are specifically trying to avoid

 

[rocksinmypath]

Forcing all players to progress to the next age at the same time is absolutely necessary to prevent players from rushing to reach the end of an age in order to make sure they can play the civ they want to play.

Regarding crises, if it were up to me, I would do it a different way. I'd introduce crisis metrics, which are costs you incur as you do all of the things you feel will progress your empire. Each age would have its own unique set of crisis metrics. A crisis metric can be local, meaning each player will have an associated "bucket" that only that player's actions can fill, or it can be global, meaning all players contribute to it. As a crisis bucket fills up, the player feels negative effects. The magnitude of said effects grows non-linearly, where the player is barely affected at the beginning (but is aware that the meter is filling up), but as the meter fills up, things get worse more and more quickly. After a certain point, the player enters "crisis" mode, where they feel "explosive" effects that aren't just continuations of what happened before crisis. In crisis mode, the player is also be given a special set of tools (e.g. policies) to deal with the crisis, similar to how it looks like it's being implemented for Civ 7.

This would make it so that you're not always guaranteed to enter a crisis at the end of an age, and you'll have a choice to make between a) progressing your empire to its maximum potential and ending up in a long, uncontrollable crisis that ends up undoing a lot of that progress by the end of the era when all crises resolve automatically, and b) carefully balancing progress and crisis metrics trying to avoid or delay a crisis for as long as you can. I'd balance the game so that a) would generally be closer to the optimum than b) is, so most playthroughs will end up in crises, but at least this way, crises won't feel quite as forced.

Civ 6 actually has a couple elements that are similar to this. Loyalty (or disloyalty) is a local crisis metric, which leads to yield penalties in the early stages, and in "crisis mode" leads to rebellions. CO2 emission is a global crisis metric, which lead to natural disasters that are increasingly devastating. Unfortunately, neither feature really belonged in Civ 6. Usually, they were both too weak to be relevant (especially CO2 emission), and I think up until now, Firaxis was really hesitant to introduce mechanisms in the game that would grossly regress the player's empire.

 

[TheGrayFox]

This is the exact situation of snowballing that the civ devs are specifically trying to avoid

It's a 4x game... Exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating other players to win is the entire point of the video game genre.

If snowballing and late game fatigue are such concerns, there were certainly much less contentious, more dynamic, and less arbitrarily restritive ways of addressing those issues from a game design perspective. Many modders have managed to do a much better job of it than Firaxis already. Seperating the game into three seperate rounds and forcing narrative of civ swapping between them seems to be Firaxis just throwing the baby out with the bathwater imo

 

[bladex1200]

It's a 4x game... Exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating other players to win is the entire point of the video game genre.

If snowballing and late game fatigue are such concerns, there were certainly much less contentious, more dynamic, and less arbitrarily restritive ways of addressing those issues from a game design perspective. Many modders have managed to do a much better job of it than Firaxis already. Seperating the game into three seperate rounds and forcing narrative of civ swapping between them seems to be Firaxis just throwing the baby out with the bathwater imo

In my view no mod has managed to eliminate late-game fatigue for Civ, the closest I've seen was the Revolutions mod for Civ IV which allowed parts of your empire to split off into separatist states if they were unhappy or mismanaged. Do you have particular mechanics in mind that you felt eliminated late-game fatigue?

 

[Arent11]

If anything is to be gleamed from the way they are presenting Civ7 and all the new mechanics and systems I would suggest that they're looking to have a "narrative" experience

What do I mean by this? It seems like the game forces a "story" to happen by injecting events and crises into a game arbitrarily.

---

Concept: Every nation falls at the end of an era, due to a mix of crises chosen by the player.

Execution: No matter what you do, your empire will fall. Narratively speaking, you will always expect it to happen. And it happens to ALL empires in the game at the SAME TIME.

Critique: First of all, once something is guaranteed to happen, it becomes predictable. There's no point in a story that plays out the same every time.
The game is better served by letting it tell its own story. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Civ6's Ages system is actually relatively more authentic than forced crises.

Analysis: this mechanic exists solely to justify civ-switching. If that mechanic wasn't there, you wouldn't have this one either.
The choose-your-poison is also very gamey and takes away from the supposed narrative that the game is trying to tell.
You don't choose what life throws at you, you choose how you react to it.

Comparison:
In Rimworld, they have a similar system to throw players into loops. In that game you run a colony in a narrative simulator where sometimes crises happen and you have to prepare and recover.
In some ways the crises are also "forced" here but the difference is the lack of "choose-your-poison" which is so evidently anti-narrative.
This narrative system also likes to throw positive events at you to mix it up.

Conclusion:
All of which has me wondering.
What are you trying to do with Civ7?
I'm not totally sold that this narrative system won't get old in a couple weeks.

That's the point. I was always in favor of more narrative elements like the "interludes" in Alpha Centauri etc. But they arose from playing the game - the interludes came when your cities were attacked or a tech was researched.

Having fixed crises that apparently occur globally(?) at certain times might become repetitive and is simply not what happens in history. No one conspires to suddenly have a crisis everywhere.

This kind of "tower defense" situation *could* be made thrilling if it's challenging & you're really fighting for the survival of your civ. But I fear that's exactly not what will happen. Because losing cities and units might quickly lead to rage quitting & Firaxis will probably not be so audacious.

Furthermore, even if the crises where actually thrilling and challenging, they are - as you point out - bound to get repetitive. There's a difference between the AI backstabbing you & suddenly declaring war, planning an invasion yourself - & having a "crisis" that everyone expects to occur and knows how it will play out.

But I will give the civ 7 designers the benefit of the doubt & see how exactly they design this. I don't know yet how exactly it is meant to work.

 

[TheGrayFox]

In my view no mod has managed to eliminate late-game fatigue for Civ, the closest I've seen was the Revolutions mod for Civ IV which allowed parts of your empire to split off into separatist states if they were unhappy or mismanaged. Do you have particular mechanics in mind that you felt eliminated late-game fatigue?

I'm so glad someone else remembers the Revolution mods from IV. Hilariously, I keep bringing those exact overhaul mods from IV in other threads/topics as the perfect example of the mechanics Firaxis should've tried to implement if they wanted to address snowballing and lategame fatigue while also trying to abstract empires historically rising and falling.

Instead the devs took the most heavyhanded and undynamic/organic design approach possible to try to address those concerns

 

[aieeegrunt]

In my view no mod has managed to eliminate late-game fatigue for Civ, the closest I've seen was the Revolutions mod for Civ IV which allowed parts of your empire to split off into separatist states if they were unhappy or mismanaged. Do you have particular mechanics in mind that you felt eliminated late-game fatigue?

Late Fame Fatigue is a different problem from Snowballing

The easiest way to deal with the former is giving the players as many tools as possible to automate various things, as well as reducing the amount of micromanagement required

Older versions of Civ had many examples of this; puppeting cities/AI govenors, setting workers on auto, etc

 

[Trav'ling Canuck]

IInstead the devs took the most heavyhanded and undynamic/organic design approach possible to try to address those concerns

Older versions of Civ had many examples of this; puppeting cities/AI govenors, setting workers on auto, etc

All of these were tried and none of them worked, the late game was still a boring slog. I'm glad the dev team is taking a fresh approach, and as someone who has played every version of Civ from 1 through 6, I'm very glad to see new ideas to keep the series fresh. Some of these won't work out, but we won't know which until the game is actually released and playable.