Atlas627
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2011
- Messages
- 2,930
No, we don't disagree on this one. I don't want chess and I don't want civ1. I want a brilliant *and* pretty game. Distractions are welcome, I want them. They make the game more fun.
Distractions aren't the problem. I have 1900 hours in Civ5, yet, I can find you perhaps 10 decisions per game that made an actual impact my every win.
Let me put it this way. Civilization is about building a house brick by brick. You can't really see if you built four windows until you laid all the bricks and finished that side of the house. And then a tank comes and wants to run over your house. Would you rather be worried about which brick goes where, or be able to tell "gimme a wall with four windows here" and then worry about where to place a bunker?
Because this is what happens.
And both the tank mechanics suffer and the house-building suffers. Oh, but you can choose to put in darkened windows now. With flowers in front.
I'm sorry, I'm even more confused by your analogy.
If you want to talk about the difference between winning and losing, that is partially because the AI is terrible. It is easy to win.
If you want to talk about decisions that feel like they have real impact, there are a few problems.
First, the more practiced you are at an unchanging puzzle, the better you are at making your decisions subconsciously. They basically aren't decisions. This is one reason why Civ6 has promised so many elements will change based on the map: the map is one of the few things that is heavily randomized from game to game. Its a new puzzle, slightly different from any you've ever seen before, even at 1900 hours. Before that, its very different. To players who haven't played that much of 5, it is still different enough that the choices are interesting to them.
Second, each giant decision drowns out many smaller decisions. As you've probably noticed by now, the only real decision in the culture tree is which tree you are going to take. Individual policies aren't worth picking and choosing from, you always want to expand your culture, you can never change your mind later, and culture doesn't actually unlock anything unique so science is still king. So if you want more big choices, what you actually want is fewer big choices. You want all the small choices to matter too. And they do, the balance is just so out of whack that you don't notice it. Finishers are so good and later policies so good that there's no point in dabbling, for example.
Third, you can't possibly know if the choices are interesting (real, basically. You can know if the genre looks boring) or not before playing the game. You can only know when you are actually presented with the choice and are aware of the context. How can you possibly say you know Civ6 will be "bad" from the mechanics revealed so far? There are some you haven't seen, and the opportunity cost between them helps drastically with making things interesting.