New Expansion Speculation Thread

[Leathaface]

Modding is another fun tangent. Personally, as a games modder of some history myself, I'd actually encourage people to push the actual tools to their limits. I get that it's tempting to ask for the thing that will grant you as much control as possible, but likewise, if you're not using the tools that are already out there, Firaxis aren't going to see the usage metrics that make them go "hey, we can use this customer base as argument for more time on tools". The DLL situation in 6 is already going to be different to 5 (with additional licensed stuff built in and so forth). It's only going to get more complicated in terms of providing modding support that isn't through the sanitised, official-tools channels.

In what ways would "licensed stuff" affect the DLL? Could it prevent the DLL source from being released?

 

[Ivan Hunger]

I've pointed it out before, at least once, and asked if anyone ever had the same experience, but nobody responded. It's weird what other tiny aspects of the game people will complain about while allowing major bugs to slide through unnoticed.

I still maintain that Mvemba's ability has been an issue since launch and has never worked. I've never seen it work in my own games, and I've even looked up youtube playthoughs to see if it worked there. I have never seen it work under any of those circumstances. If someone actually has a screen shot of it every working then please share it.

Yes, I see you made a post about it that got buried at the bottom of a page. But that was in July, which was still after the latest patch, so it's not super useful in narrowing down exactly when the ability broke.

Like I said in the bug report thread, I have at least one game with strong evidence that the ability used to work as intended, if not outright proof. Unfortunately, loading a save from that game in order to take a screenshot would be useless, as it would still be running under the rules of the latest patch, where the ability doesn't work.

Not that it actually matters. Regardless of whether or not the ability was functioning correctly before, it's still bugged now and needs to be fixed. Let's keep our fingers crossed that someone at Firaxis is lurking in this thread, as they've sometimes been known to do, and will make any relevant parties aware of the problem.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

Some of the best games punishes you harder than any wife you'll ever find. Rimworld, CK2, xcom (their own ffs), FTL... a cookie-cutter game that doesn't punish you is boring and repetative.

I can smell a masochist here
Dude random punishing player is not the only way to make a game not repetitive. Honesty its very bad and lazy way of game designing.
I am sure it would be a very bad direction for the Civ series.

 

[Gedemon]

Random, you mean like a barbarian camp?

 

[Zaarin]

Sid Meier himself decided against putting in natural disasters and in general any negative consequences outside the control of the player. As a game designer his stance is that this mechanism doesn't create a good experience for the player.

Random events don't have to be game breaking, nor do they have to be solely negative. Small random events that can have both positive and negative effects could add a lot of depth to Civ's emergent storytelling without making or breaking the game. Well-designed random events would have less impact on your success than things already determined randomly like your starting location, nearby luxuries and civs, or barbarian hordes.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Sid Meier himself decided against putting in natural disasters and in general any negative consequences outside the control of the player. As a game designer his stance is that this mechanism doesn't create a good experience for the player.

I think he is right.

Does he have much say in the games creation anymore?
I wouldn't mind natural disasters if they're not game breaking. Also like somebody said earlier, if the natural disaster is widespread it could trigger an emergency for certain leaders to help combat whatever happened. As for negative consequences outside the control of the player, he forgot nuke happy Gandhi with his nukes.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

Does he have much say in the games creation anymore?

Maybe better he does. To keep core of the game healthy and safe from bad ideas.
Sorry guys but the whole problem here is this "if"
I wouldn't mind robbers if they wouldn't steal money
I wouldn't mind playing the lottery if I would win

 

[cvb]

Sid Meier himself decided against [...] and in general any negative consequences outside the control of the player.

As for example in Civ1 with a Militia unit entering a "Goody Hut" and the possibility to find itself surrounded by up to 8(!) Cavalry units, which each has a fifty-fifty chance to kill the Militia?

Surely a very seldom worst case, but nevertheless possible. And any number of barbarians were not so seldom.

 

[Giskler]

Smoke and Itest branches got updated 5-6 hours ago.

 

[nzcamel]

Sid Meier himself decided against putting in natural disasters and in general any negative consequences outside the control of the player. As a game designer his stance is that this mechanism doesn't create a good experience for the player.

I think he is right.

I suspect you are mistaking the oft repeated line of Firaxis's that finding a fun way to do something is better than the reverse. I heard it most often in relation to when golden ages were introduced, with Soren Johnson explaining that they had started out wanting to add dark ages; but decided that wasn't fun at all and went the other way around, cos they could. Which I think we can all agree is pretty good logic.

Obviously fast forward to R&F, and Firaxis flipped the switch on that thinking somewhat by introducing dark ages alongside golden ages; but with the ability for the player to have a degree of control over the likelihood, and with some interesting ways forward once one is in a dark age. I like that they're willing to rethink what was previously thought a no go.

Does he have much say in the games creation anymore?

Pretty sure he has an oversight role with teeth if need be. Ed Beach met with him weekly during the design of VI.​

 

[agonistes]

You paid for a playable game and you got a playable game. You not being happy with it is irrelevant. For that matter, steam even has the option to return it within a certain time/played time, lol.
In theory, patches are only a courtesy of the developers, though I guess it is in their favour to keep the player base happy. But still, no entitlement.

Well, this is just wrong all the way around. A buyer is certainly entitled to a certain amount of quality, and that level of quality is more than 'playable.'

However, yes, should have returned the game long ago.

But because patches and fixes exist, hoping that obvious issues are resolved seems forgivable. To me.

Anyhow... I hope this xpac is playable without having rnf enabled.

Just stepping in here for a bit.

It's fine to be disappointed. It's not fine to draw a direct line between you paying for a game that the publisher maintains the revenue stream for, and the wages paid to the developers (by the publisher) for their 9 - 5 (well, often more in games dev) job.

Your money pays for a product (or a service, if you're being picky). It doesn't pay your way to tell the devs what they should be working on. Bugs not getting fixed is frustrating, but it seems you don't really understand why or even how this process works the way it does. You really think people play this game and don't note down bugs? Do you think that all you have to do to fix a bug is note down the fact that it happens? If so, that's naive.

Stop pinning things on "playtesting". To fix even one thing in a piece of software the size of Civ 6 requires a lot more than just noting a bug's existence.

Quite often not much more. Often its simply one letter in one line of code.

Seems fairly obvious that there are or were issues in the game that could have been quickly fixed if they had been noticed in playtesting. So either they were noticed and nobody bothered to fix them, or they were never noticed, which indicates a lack of playtesting.

 

[Gorbles]

Quite often not much more. Often its simply one letter in one line of code.

Seems fairly obvious that there are or were issues in the game that could have been quickly fixed if they had been noticed in playtesting. So either they were noticed and nobody bothered to fix them, or they were never noticed, which indicates a lack of playtesting.

Often it's an assumption made by someone with zero familiarity with the codebase. That's the problem here.

I don't want to drag this out, which is why I stopped replying in the first place. You don't understand software development, that's fine. But don't attribute to laziness what can be attributed to a regular AA / AAA release cycle. I'm not defending the nature of the cycle (it's too short, imo, developers are often overworked, the job market is very volatile, etc), but there isn't anything that the developers can do to magically do more in their working day. You want to assume that it's laziness? That's on you.

 

[Proclo]

I'm also really hoping for a return of the world congress and ideaologies from V. The late-game badly needs something to affect the status quo, otherwise the game will always just feel like it's over when you start snowballing in the mid-game, and you just keep hitting next turn until you win.

Ideologies are simply essential for the late-game. They should do something similar to what they did in Civ5, the 3 blocs, the hostility between them and of course the inability to choose some policies depending of you government.

 

[Dedrytus]

Ha, do you remember Vedic Aryans from CIV? It was the best random event ever ;-) Personally I find random events entertaining if they are made correct. No Vedic Aryans again.

 

[donald23]

In what ways would "licensed stuff" affect the DLL? Could it prevent the DLL source from being released?

Yes. The stuff that is licensed is mentioned on the text when you have to click continue after the intro.
As I understand it, the license Firaxis/2K Games had, needs to have redistribution and others ability to work on it on there as well. That's not always included, and can very well be the choice of the source company not to provide that license.

So, yes, that can very easily prevent the DLL source to be made available.

 

[ChocolateShake]

I think natural disasters could be well implemented using a system of points as @Wielki Hegemon had suggested earlier. I think if the expansion name really is Vesuvius, we should see volcanoes return, that would be cool if maybe they grant more faith at the risk of them occasionally erupting and destroying surrounding improvements, for example.

I kind of hope that the existing systems are enriched while new additions are kept to a minimum. The emergency framework would work well probably as a substitute for the world congress.

I also expect it'll be independent of Rise and Fall, I'm not sure if that's normally the trend with expansions. Looking forward to trying to hunt civ clues in the trailer hopefully

 

[Proclo]

I think natural disasters could be well implemented using a system of points as @Wielki Hegemon had suggested earlier. I think if the expansion name really is Vesuvius, we should see volcanoes return, that would be cool if maybe they grant more faith at the risk of them occasionally erupting and destroying surrounding improvements, for example.

As I already said, @Wielki Hegemon 's idea is great, but when it comes to some natural disasters, not caused by humans, you can't use a doom clock. It is just a random event. For example earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. What you can do instead, it is to prepare yourself for them. Better buildings, giving up the fertile lands beneath volcanos...

 

[IdiotStyle]

I hope a teasing tweet today <3

 

[Gedemon]

Yes. The stuff that is licensed is mentioned on the text when you have to click continue after the intro.
As I understand it, the license Firaxis/2K Games had, needs to have redistribution and others ability to work on it on there as well. That's not always included, and can very well be the choice of the source company not to provide that license.

So, yes, that can very easily prevent the DLL source to be made available.

I'm wondering which of those would be included in the GameCoreDLL ?

Usually they are in separate DLLs or in the exe.

There could be an issue with the Lua maybe (Havok Script) and how to link what we do in GameCoreDLL with the Lua side (for the UI and GameplayScript), but even then that shouldn't prevent opening the GameCoreDLL itself.

 

[Wielki Hegemon]

Maybe let's go back to the basics. how I understand random events and RNG in Civilization game.
How I understand bad RNG in Civilization.
It is a random event you cant play around.
- Are barbaric camps randomly spawning in a map good or bad rng? They are bad RNG
- Is it good or bad mechanic? I don't like this mechanic and I remember raging barbarians was commonly hated at the start of the game.
Is it game breaking? Not quite. Sometimes in a harder difficulty, it forces you to restart a game. Not because you have made a mistake, but RNG punished you. This is just a bad experience.
Is this a way to make a game deep and unique? Yes, but in an annoying and bad way. It is just a lazy design.
Do we need similar mechanics? Hell no!

So how I see a good RNG in disasters in CiV game?
It should be all around managing a risk.
Bad RNG is
- random coastal titles are randomly flooded and destroying your improvement.
- random meteor strikes in a random title and destroying your improvement.
You can't do anything with this and it is bad.
Good RNG is:
- you have a new title Volcano from the start of the game. It gives you benefit for example - +1 food and +1 production for adjacent titles, but there is a risk (let's say 5% in each turn) it will erupt and destroy you improvement or even a city. And you have to manage a risk. You have still RNG in this mechanic, but you can play around it and I makes the game deeper.
- you have the possibility to build a factory "without standards" - it is faster, cheaper but... there is a risk (let's say 5% in each turn) it will collapse. Again. You are managing a risk, there is still RNG but it makes the game deeper.

I am OK with good RNG in Civilization VI disasters
I am not ok with bad RNG. I hope it made things more clear now.

And still, I think even good RNG is not easy to balance. So volcanos will be either powerful or you will avoid them.