Is it time to move on? - Discussion/Debate

[poom3619]

What, leave? Civilization is not the usual game, that you play a lot, then lesss and then stop playing it. It's a game where you can always come back. I play lots of games, but between each 2-4 of them, I always play some civilization games. I don't play 2 months straight. I play some games, then leave it again, play some other new shiny game, and then come back to civ.

If you are bored, you don't have to leave it forever. Just stop playing, play something else. And maybe in 1 month you will play again. This has been the case since civ1. Few other games are like this.

Agreed, Recent game I played since a year ago is
Civ5 BNW -> CivBE (meh) -> EU4 -> Endless Legend (not my cup of tea) -> EU4 + Fire Emblem -> GalCiv2 -> EU4 Art of War+ CK2 -> Civ4 with and without Fall from Heaven -> Rise of Nation -> CK2 + Civ5 (with load of new civ mod)

It's hardly time to move on since there is no Civ6 yet. I also REALLY doubt that Civ6 will be good game until a year after release. Maybe come back to Civ4 or some old great game.

 

[reddishrecue]

I don't know civ 6 just seems too soon already to come out. There's still plenty of time left for civ 5 and its multiplayer gameplays. Multiplayer is what keeps civ 5 moving on so far and used to keep civ 4 moving on. GMR is still on and is still playable for civ 5 and civ 4 I believe. GMR could be the only way to be able to play civ 4 now since civ 4 multiplayer is down because people boycotted and didn't want to use the multiplayer services to keep going with it Im guessing. If people would've liked civ 4 mp more and kept playing with it then civ 4 mp would definitely still be up for sure. My guess, most people thought that civ 5 was better.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Agreed, Recent game I played since a year ago is
Civ5 BNW -> CivBE (meh) -> EU4 -> Endless Legend (not my cup of tea) -> EU4 + Fire Emblem -> GalCiv2 -> EU4 Art of War+ CK2 -> Civ4 with and without Fall from Heaven -> Rise of Nation -> CK2 + Civ5 (with load of new civ mod)

It's hardly time to move on since there is no Civ6 yet. I also REALLY doubt that Civ6 will be good game until a year after release. Maybe come back to Civ4 or some old great game.

Give Victoria 2 (with PDM once you're familiar with the game), Civ4 with Final Frontier Plus (a Final Frontier modmod that adds things that were oddly missing from the original Final Frontier, like wonders), and Civ4 with Planetfall a try? You'll probably play all three of them more than GalCiv2 (not surprising given that there's at least twice as much complexity-without-depth in it compared to Civ5 BNW).

This thread makes me wonder... how much were people waiting for Civ5 after Civ4 BtS 3.19 but before it was actually announced?

 

[twilson1972]

Semi-necropost, but whatever...

I don't think it's been brought up yet, but there's one *thing* that made Civ4 superb that's been missing from Civ5 and even more so from CivBE. I definitely know there was some of it Civ3 and a bit less in Civ2, but this *thing* I'm talking about is why I'm really, really hoping that someone other than the current Civ5/CivBE team will head the design of Civ6.

That *thing* is design elegance. Civ4 is filled with it, Civ5 has almost none of it.

Let me give you a few examples of design elegance in Civ4 if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Long post incoming!

First though, a bit of background info: Civ4 dealt with governments by a system called civics. They were essentially government "modes" that were split into 5 categories (government, legal system, labor, economy, religion). You slowly unlocked them via tech and could mix and match any civics you wanted, albeit with a few penalties: 1) each time you swapped civics to a new batch, your empire would go into "anarchy", where you essentially missed a turn, and 2) each civic had an associated upkeep (gold was used to control expansion in Civ4 and happiness was used to control individual city growth) that affected the amount of gold you had to pay each turn for your cities.

First example of design elegance: the "democracy" civics (Universal Suffrage, Free Speech, Emancipation). These civics were supposed to be the more democracy-oriented civics for Government, Legal, and Labor respectively. Their main effects were to boost the yields of Village and Town improvements to ludicrous levels: you could essentially have a Civ5 custom's house's worth of gold yield that generated a hammer as well from a regular improvement. The catch? Well, Village and Town improvements couldn't be built, they had to be grown. Workers would build a Cottage improvement, roughly equivalent to a trading post in Civ5, and when that Cottage tile was worked for 10 turns, it would turn into a Hamlet (with slightly improved yield), then a Village after another 20 turns, then a Town after a final 40; Emancipation cut the time in half, but it was still a very long time.
Here's where the elegance comes in: if an enemy unit pillages a Village/Town tile, that improvement gets destroyed, which means it will take another 70 or so turns before someone running a democracy civic would get their bonuses back. As a result, Civ4 disincentivizes "democracy" players from waging wars, or at least wars that are close to their home turf, because a single wayward enemy unit could wreck untold havoc on a democracy player's economy.

Another example of design elegance: religion civics. Besides the default civics, there are four religion civics in Civ4: Organized Religion, Theocracy, Pacifism, and Free Religion. Organized Religion gives a production boost when producing buildings in cities that have your religion and lets you build missionaries in cities without monasteries (in Civ4, missionaries require a monastery to built in a city before they can be made, which can cost quite a lot of hammers and can no longer be built after Scientific Method is researched), Theocracy gives a barrack's worth of XP to units produced in cities with your religion (and a second effect I'll ignore for now), Free Religion gives +15% beakers in all cities and happiness from each religion in each city, and let's ignore Pacifism for now; Organized Religion has High Upkeep, Theocracy has Medium Upkeep, and Free Religion has Low Upkeep.
The elegance comes from the bonuses themselves. Early on, being able to build missionaries without have to dedicate hammers to a separate building is a huge boon, the +25% production boost to buildings is also quite helpful, and the high upkeep is easy to swallow when you only have two or three cities. Likewise, the barrack's worth of extra XP to military units means all your military units essentially start off with one extra promotion, and the medium upkeep is even easier to pay than Organized Religion's high upkeep. However, as the game goes on, those bonuses start losing their worth: if you already have monasteries built in each city (they give culture and a bit of science, so it's worth building them sooner or later), that missionary bonus is wasted, and the +25% production boost becomes less and less worth the ludicrous amount of gold you'll have to start paying in upkeep. Similarly, Theocracy's XP bonus becomes negligible when you already have two or three XP-giving buildings in your production cities, since the increasing XP requirements to promote a unit at higher levels means that your units aren't starting off with an extra promotion, just an extra 2 battles' worth of XP.
Even if you have all religion civics unlocked, the game incentivizes following a historic route: having an organized religion or theocracy in the ancient and middle ages, and slowly migrating to free religion in the industrial and modern eras. And this happens naturally through just a simple set of static modifiers, not through forced era gating or arbitrary increases in units' cost.

A third example of design elegance: espionage in Civ4. Espionage in Civ4 worked in two halves: you generated espionage "currency" in your empire from buildings, civics, improvements, etc., and you could spend that intrigue currency on espionage actions performed by Spy units. Spy units were essentially civilians that were invisible to all other units except enemy spies and did not require open borders treaties to move in other people's territory, so you could actually use them as scouts as well as for the espionage system (that's a fourth example of design elegance!), but otherwise you'd have to move them into position before you could use them to perform an espionage action, like stealing gold or poisoning a city's water supply or sabotaging a city's production. To counter spies, you had access to both passive and active counterespionage. Passive counterespionage could be done by increasing your own espionage generation or by building buildings, and it increased the espionage costs of actions against your empire, to the point where people would just go mess with someone else because actions against you would be too costly. Active counterespionage could be done by placing your own spies throughout your empire and having them just watch for spies.
Here's the elegance: spies were still units, and just like all units, you had to pay upkeep for them. And since large empires often needed at least 12 or so spies at minimum to perform basic counterespionage duties, that's a lot of upkeep for having to cover so much ground. You essentially had to decide whether to pay a stupid amount of upkeep to keep your empire spy-free, or to allow a few cracks here and there to give yourself some financial respite and hope your opponents wouldn't catch on.
No weird interplay between increasing spy costs and weird intrigue counters on top of cities, just three basic systems meshing together to form this wonderful system: the fact that you need to place spy units in your enemy's empire to activate espionage actions, the fact that your enemy needs to place their own spy units all over their empire to catch your spies, and the fact that each spy the enemy maintains is another unit they have to pay upkeep for.

I could literally go on and on about Civ4's elegant design, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This is why I'm so worried about Firaxis' current trajectory (Civ4 -> Civ5 -> CivBE). It's not because they're making bad games, it's because they reached a pinnacle of design elegance in Civ4 and then proceeded to replace these elegant interactions with gamey, overbearing, needlessly obtuse systems that often ended up working worse/shallower.

Excellent post that explains a lot of what i was trying to say on another thread

I dont think civ v is a bad game..im playing it afterall!!!.

But yes it feels 'gamey' and for me immersion is a big part of the enjoyment.

Personally while i found civ iv excellent, i did wonder why we dont have the beautiful wonder movies, clips of riots in the streets, and leaders changing their clothes as time passed- immersion.

 

[reddishrecue]

Yeah what you guys said about the civilization 4 and the difference of civilization 5 is that civilization 4 has some things that are better than civilization 5 and that civilization 5 was left out with. Hollywood wonder being left out could be a good example but it seems that the shoshone were replaced instead for hollywood since it is part of USA and the western part of USA. As for shwedagon paya and siam or india, I see indonesia as its replacement.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Hollywood wonder being left out could be a good example but it seems that the shoshone were replaced instead for hollywood since it is part of USA and the western part of USA. As for shwedagon paya and siam or india, I see indonesia as its replacement.

What has... what? How does a civ with a stronger scout UU who can choose goody hut results, a cheaper and faster cavalry UU, and a UA that makes cities start with larger borders replace a wonder that generates 3 copies of a unique luxury? The closest replacement I can think of to Civ4's Hollywood, Broadway, and Rock 'n' Roll wonders is Indonesia's UA that gives the player unique luxuries to keep and/or trade, much like the mentioned Civ4 wonders.
Since Civ5 doesn't really have anything that resembles Civ4's religion civics (since Civ4's religion civics revolved around Civ4's religion system), nothing can really replace Shwedagon Paya.

 

[reddishrecue]

What has... what? How does a civ with a stronger scout UU who can choose goody hut results, a cheaper and faster cavalry UU, and a UA that makes cities start with larger borders replace a wonder that generates 3 copies of a unique luxury? The closest replacement I can think of to Civ4's Hollywood, Broadway, and Rock 'n' Roll wonders is Indonesia's UA that gives the player unique luxuries to keep and/or trade, much like the mentioned Civ4 wonders.
Since Civ5 doesn't really have anything that resembles Civ4's religion civics (since Civ4's religion civics revolved around Civ4's religion system), nothing can really replace Shwedagon Paya.

Are these reasons why civ 4 could be better than civ 5? I was naming these facts that got replaced like that because of their geographical location. Shwedagon Paya, if you would read the help, is in a way different geographical location that's separated from Indonesia.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Are these reasons why civ 4 could be better than civ 5?

Nope, it's just that what you said left me with this face:

I was naming these facts that got replaced like that because of their geographical location. Shwedagon Paya, if you would read the help, is in a way different geographical location that's separated from Indonesia.

Ah, right, theming replacements. I don't think theming replacements are really a thing though: Firaxis creates (or should create) an abstract system first, then dresses them up in historical context afterwards. It's why having a "Rock 'n' Roll" wonder doesn't really make sense from a theme context (why does a musical style developed in various places have to be something you build through industrial production in a single city?), but in a gameplay sense, it satisfies the rule of three for wonders that give unique luxuries.
Likewise, I don't think Firaxis added the Shoshone to somehow "replace" the missing Hollywood wonder in representing the Western United States. They simply made an expansive, cavalry-based civ that would probably fit best with a Native American tribe's theme, then gave it a Shoshone theme instead of a Sioux theme for the same reason they gave Boudicca to Celts (instead of, say, Vercingetorix) or Theodora to Byzantines (instead of Justinian), or Wu Zetian to China (instead of a more known ruler, like Qin Shi-Huang). They wanted to bring people's attention to a less known, but possibly equally important, figure in a way that doesn't have any effect on the gameplay itself; for some other civs, like the Ottomans, their UA is solely representative of the leader instead of the actual people (eg. Ottomans' naval prowess ended at the Battle of Lepanto, 5 years after Suleiman's death, and never really recovered in the following 347 years that the empire lasted).

 

[Ymir9]

We all know that Civ 6 won't be any good until the second expansion comes out. So really, the only solution is to approach every Civ game with a 3 year delay.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

We all know that Civ 6 won't be any good until the second expansion comes out. So really, the only solution is to approach every Civ game with a 3 year delay.

This was only the case with Civ5. SMAC is a good game without SMAX, SMAX just makes it great. Civ3 was a good game that remained good with Play the World and Conquests (I think, some people may say that Conquests made it great). Civ4 was a good game without expansions, Warlords just made it great and BtS made it superb. Civ:Col doesn't have any expansions and is still fairly good. Really, Civ5 was the first game Firaxis made that was not a good game without expansions (it was an OK game), though it sadly wasn't the last *cough*CivBE*cough*.

 

[twilson1972]

^^ civworld was awful, i expected to love it but hated it.

 

[erhaminus]

Unfortunatelly, as far as I can see the trend of the next Civ releases I do not believe than they will enhance civ with core features like: real, deep diplomacy, armies, manpower, military tradition, and much more features well known in other games. They should enhance strategic aspects/thinking, not tactical, and create much more complex game. Hopefully!

 

[Redaxe]

This was only the case with Civ5. SMAC is a good game without SMAX, SMAX just makes it great. Civ3 was a good game that remained good with Play the World and Conquests (I think, some people may say that Conquests made it great). Civ4 was a good game without expansions, Warlords just made it great and BtS made it superb. Civ:Col doesn't have any expansions and is still fairly good. Really, Civ5 was the first game Firaxis made that was not a good game without expansions (it was an OK game), though it sadly wasn't the last *cough*CivBE*cough*.

But that's the whole point. I don't want to spend all this time playing a game that is maybe 7.5 out of 10 when an expansion that will make it 9/10 is going to be out a year later.
I've been let down by too many 4x games so I'm happy to wait for expansions

 

[Kolbeg]

I´m just so pessimistic about anything that Firaxis does lately. Yet I´m 100% going to buy a Civ6 game or an expansion for Beyond Earth.

But at the same time my resentment for everything Firaxis related. Their approach to the industry and customers is plain awful. I´m hope they manage to change my opinion as soon as possible.

They don´t actively support their games, and everything that they do takes sooooo loooong to get done. Civ 5 runs so poorly and turns take to long to process, using mods and searching for mods is so clunky, the editor is worse then what we had in Civ2 and Smac. Not to mention how ancient the MP environment is.

Why the don´t they get off their asses and show some ambition and willingness to improve their product, even though it will not give gold in their coffers right away. Frustration is my feeling with Firaxis and their latest products.

Expansions have become a way to implement necessary additions and fixes that should have been in the original version. Just imagining how raw Civ6 is gonna be makes me not really want to play it from the get-go. Just as I´ve shelved Civ:BE, hoping that it we get some REAL overhaul and expansion in the future.

The only thing I can do now is occasionally and frustratingly play a Civ5: BNW, mostly because of some nostalgic feeling, only to be reminded of why I stopped playing last time. Angrily close the game and move on to some other games that have something more in common with the 21 century.

 

[twilson1972]

If you dont enjoy the game kolbeg then obvously dont play it

But i dont really subscribe to the hate wagon with civ v.

I do feel it lacks ...'soul' in some ways and feels more like a board game than previous civs (i dont buy that 1upt makes great tactics as it is hardly rocket science)

But i still think its a fun game.

To be honest every civ game has the same issues for me from civ 2 onward

1) endgame is boring when you know its in the bag..i abandon over half my games.

2) higher difficulties just mean bonus's for the ai- i wish it would mean better ai but that wont happen. Forget early wonders on higher levels.

3) on higher difficulties there tend to be 'niche' ways to win. (on civ iv id always war early)

4) massive dependence on starting position for how game will go (yes i know some will win on any start)


Having said all that, its still a lot better than most games out there, id do think the game is moving towards a 'tactics/rpg' emphasis than sandbox/empire building though so i am unsure if ill get civ 6

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

But that's the whole point. I don't want to spend all this time playing a game that is maybe 7.5 out of 10 when an expansion that will make it 9/10 is going to be out a year later.
I've been let down by too many 4x games so I'm happy to wait for expansions

I don't unfortunately know how your point scale works, so I don't know what you mean *exactly* when you say a game is a 7.5/10. On my scale, I am often willing to play games that I would rate at 7.5/10 (eg. something like Greed Corp) because those games are good enough: I don't care if it will become a 9/10 game down the line through a future expansion, if the game is worth the money when it comes out, I will buy it and play it. It's why Civ5 was the first Firaxis game I didn't purchase before the expansions came out, because I did my research, and it did not seem like the kind of 4X game I would buy for its price. Even if Civ4's two expansions made the game better, the base game was still good for its price, so I was still willing to buy it (incidentally, I'd rate Civ4 at 8.0, Warlords at 8.5, and BtS at 9.0 if we're on a 20-point scale, all increased by 0.5 if it's not your first Civ game; Civ5 sans expansions would be around a 6.0, G&K makes it 7.5, BNW makes it 8.5, with no alteration if it's not your first Civ game).

I´m just so pessimistic about anything that Firaxis does lately. Yet I´m 100% going to buy a Civ6 game or an expansion for Beyond Earth.

But at the same time my resentment for everything Firaxis related. Their approach to the industry and customers is plain awful. I´m hope they manage to change my opinion as soon as possible.

They don´t actively support their games, and everything that they do takes sooooo loooong to get done. Civ 5 runs so poorly and turns take to long to process, using mods and searching for mods is so clunky, the editor is worse then what we had in Civ2 and Smac. Not to mention how ancient the MP environment is.

Why the don´t they get off their asses and show some ambition and willingness to improve their product, even though it will not give gold in their coffers right away. Frustration is my feeling with Firaxis and their latest products.

Expansions have become a way to implement necessary additions and fixes that should have been in the original version. Just imagining how raw Civ6 is gonna be makes me not really want to play it from the get-go. Just as I´ve shelved Civ:BE, hoping that it we get some REAL overhaul and expansion in the future.

The only thing I can do now is occasionally and frustratingly play a Civ5: BNW, mostly because of some nostalgic feeling, only to be reminded of why I stopped playing last time. Angrily close the game and move on to some other games that have something more in common with the 21 century.

I imagine that it has to do primarily with two things: the fact that Firaxis has started to shy away from having a lot of low-level programmers (by low-level, I mean people who work at the engine-level, so usually C++ or assembly programmers, as you always end up encountering situations where you need engine modifications to implement a design tool or a gameplay feature) and the fact that Firaxis' design team is dominated by people who are more theme-focused than math-focused (hence why a lot of the credited designers in CivBE are also credited as being writers). For the former, just check the CivBE credits: there are 13 credited designers/writers, 31 credited artists, only one credited QA (no wonder so many bugs went unnoticed), and 14 credited programmers, of which at least 2 worked on the Lua side only, and of which at least 3 worked on the graphics portion solely, leaving at most 9 people to work on everything else (including working on the tools that would allow the designers to implement whatever idea they wanted to come up with). The latter doesn't necessarily mean that they are bad at math, it's just that when it comes to both making and analyzing games, there is less knowledge in their math toolbox than is needed to easily make good 4X games: they'll be missing things like function analysis (aka. calculus) for making sure their systems don't have any undesirable side effects, graph theory to make sure that all paths through the tech tree can be viable and that the topology of their maps isn't terrible, combinatorics to make sure their randomization functions are ideally made for the tasks at hand, and sequence/series analysis to ensure that any function analysis stuff they do holds up in the discrete space of whole-number tile yields and costs.

The sad thing is that the best high school-level math education the US and the UK (and from what I've been told, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada as well) has to offer only really covers function analysis (graph theory isn't taught at all, combinatorics is taught at an incredibly basic level, and sequence/series analysis is either barely taught or completely ignored), so most fresh-faced, English-speaking designers who haven't gotten out of their way to make up for their one-sided and/or poor math education will be at a severe disadvantage when designing systems that need to make use of such math knowledge (eg. 4X systems, grand strategy games, intricate CRPGs, accurate city simulations, social simulations, economic simulations, etc.).

But i dont really subscribe to the hate wagon with civ v.

I wouldn't call it hate, I would call it more of a worrying trend both in Firaxis' recent games and in the game industry as a whole: games rely too much on obtuse or unwieldy mechanics to try to generate depth instead of relying on the simple mechanics that interplay to generate such inordinate amounts of strategic depth (as a result of meticulous design and/or happy accidents).
When you go to a restaurant that has produced excellent meals in the past 7 years (SMAC, Civ3, Civ4, CivCol; Firaxis was formed after Civ2 I believe) and suddenly start getting meals that are OK (Civ5), you may think, "Eh, maybe it's just a temporary thing." But when that same restaurant's meal quality continues to drop (CivBE), that's when you really start to worry.

I do feel it lacks ...'soul' in some ways and feels more like a board game than previous civs (i dont buy that 1upt makes great tactics as it is hardly rocket science)

If it feels more like a board game, that's probably due to the fact that the game's designers come from a board game background. They said so at Firaxicon, when they were playing with the XCOM board game. This might not inherently be a problem if it weren't for the fact that the game seems to be designed as a singleplayer board game (relying a lot on the fact that the AI is serviceable but dumb) instead of a multiplayer one.

To be honest every civ game has the same issues for me from civ 2 onward

1) endgame is boring when you know its in the bag..i abandon over half my games.

I get the feeling you haven't played a lot of multiplayer games: those tend to be decided in the lategame, especially so in BNW, with its imbalanced-as-balls units like Stealth Bomber and XCOM.

2) higher difficulties just mean bonus's for the ai- i wish it would mean better ai but that wont happen. Forget early wonders on higher levels.

3) on higher difficulties there tend to be 'niche' ways to win. (on civ iv id always war early)

These two are closely intertwined: the reason there is a niche is because the AI's bonuses make a lot of gameplay options that were previously viable no longer a good option. At higher difficulty levels, this includes any option that is not exploiting the AI's poor coding.

4) massive dependence on starting position for how game will go (yes i know some will win on any start)

Once again, this is probably due to the fact that you're thinking about high difficulty singleplayer games as opposed to multiplayer games: starts other than ones that are incredibly good or incredibly terrible aren't as important (though this is less the case in BNW, where discovering a city-state first or a natural wonder early on can really start your snowball), it's only when your gameplay options become extremely restricted thanks to the AI's bonuses that anything that is not a good start will not be enough.

Having said all that, its still a lot better than most games out there, id do think the game is moving towards a 'tactics/rpg' emphasis than sandbox/empire building though so i am unsure if ill get civ 6

The problem isn't that it's not better than most mediocre games out there, it's that Firaxis, a studio known for essentially inventing the 4X genre and consistently produced some of the best 4X games ever made, has started lately seen a downward trend in the quality of their games. It would be like the inventors of the city builder genre, who had also made excellent city builders in the past, suddenly started producing OK-to-mediocre city builders... oh wait...

 

[twilson1972]

I imagine that it has to do primarily with two things: the fact that Firaxis has started to shy away from having a lot of low-level programmers (by low-level, I mean people who work with low-level languages like assembly or C++) and the fact that Firaxis' design team is dominated by people who are more theme-focused than math-focused

Im showing my age now, but nearly 30 years ago i played a space game that had thousands of galaxies, AI, 3d graphics and trading and police status's etc

It ran in 22KB of memory

 

[Kolbeg]

If you dont enjoy the game kolbeg then obvously dont play it

I understand that, and that is why most of the time I do not play it. But every now and then I get the craving for playing a civ game. Then shortly after getting into it these for mentioned emotions start to build up.

I really want this project to succeed and I really want a good Civ game to be available, but I´m just not feeling it. Also I´m becoming frustrated with Firaxis as I´m realizing that they are porbably not going to be able to deliver (I hope I´m wrong). This is becoming more of a resentmment to how they choose to do things rather than their bastard games.

I feel like Civ5:BNW is an "okey" game, at least way better than what is originally was, but I still feel like Firaxis could continue to improve it rather than going on to Civ 6.

Same goes for BE, I truely would like it to succeed, but who knows what is going on inside Firaxis, where is the active dialog with their customers.

1) endgame is boring when you know its in the bag..i abandon over half my games.

2) higher difficulties just mean bonus's for the ai- i wish it would mean better ai but that wont happen. Forget early wonders on higher levels.

This I totally agree with and feel the same way. These are some of the issues that point to a lazy, stagnant, un-innovative and un-enthusiastic Firaxis company culture, more than anything.

 

[Delnar_Ersike]

Im showing my age now, but nearly 30 years ago i played a space game that had thousands of galaxies, AI, 3d graphics and trading and police status's etc

It ran in 22KB of memory

Now to be fair, most things Elite were either well pulled-off illusions or things you may think are complicated to pull off, but are actually quite easily programmed. So long as you have enough factors to randomly generate (and the fact that rules don't need to be incredibly specific about how these factors must interplay), you can "store" millions of galaxies in 1kB: all it'd actually contain is a data-interpreter that can interpret can take 32 bytes of data (large enough to produce a wide enough range of results, with 4 bytes technically being able to represent around 4.29 billion possibilities, so 32 bytes is 4.29 billion ^8 = approx. 1.15*10^77 possibilities) and push the relevant bits of that data into all the right parameter values (eg. system type, population, system government, etc.). Then, the bulk of the "data" stored is actually just a pseudo-random number generator that can generate 32 bytes of data, something that can be pulled off in a surprisingly small amount of instructions. Trading is, again, implemented through 12-16 parameters that have arithmetical modifiers based on the previous, randomly generated propertes. Police status can literally be implemented with a number that is stored in a byte of data and at most 16 bytes' worth of instructions: load <memory location that corresponds to reputation> into register, jle (jump-if-less-than) <number that corresponds to attack-on-sight notoriety threshold>, call attack-on-sight function, jle <number that corresponds to suspicious notoriety threshold>, call suspicious function, so on and so forth. Rudimentary AI can also be implemented this way.
The most taxing is actually 3D graphics, since the code needs to be small enough and fast enough to run at a playable framerate on an 8086-performance CPU without all the fancy SSE operations that do wonders performance-wise when dealing with non-integer numbers.

 

[Redaxe]

I don't unfortunately know how your point scale works, so I don't know what you mean *exactly* when you say a game is a 7.5/10. On my scale, I am often willing to play games that I would rate at 7.5/10 (eg. something like Greed Corp) because those games are good enough: I don't care if it will become a 9/10 game down the line through a future expansion, if the game is worth the money when it comes out, I will buy it and play it. It's why Civ5 was the first Firaxis game I didn't purchase before the expansions came out, because I did my research, and it did not seem like the kind of 4X game I would buy for its price. Even if Civ4's two expansions made the game better, the base game was still good for its price, so I was still willing to buy it (incidentally, I'd rate Civ4 at 8.0, Warlords at 8.5, and BtS at 9.0 if we're on a 20-point scale, all increased by 0.5 if it's not your first Civ game; Civ5 sans expansions would be around a 6.0, G&K makes it 7.5, BNW makes it 8.5, with no alteration if it's not your first Civ game).

Well let me clarify. There are heaps of 4x games that come out that receive good reviews on release but few ever get to the 9-9.5/10.

Expansions tend to iron out the bugs and make the experience more enjoyable. But its a matter of personal preference. It seems like the business model for gaming companies is to invest modestly in a game and if it sells well enough then the company puts more money out for an expansion.
Personally I rather wait for the xpansion