pre-release info New First Look: Xerxes

[stealth_nsk]

It would only work on your allies so as a counter (to make sure that you only vote for yourself and not yourself + an ally possible leading to their win)

1. ruin your relationship with them (this would be the military victory so declare surprise war and suffer the massive penalties…or just spend influence to degrade the relationship)
2. spend your influence to get other civs to stop supporting them (you should probably be able to spend influence to get them off of your own support list)

Expectations: You don't need to conquer your allies to get conquest victory
Reality: You attack your allies, so they can't claim your victory for themselves through diplomatic methods
This looks more and more clumsy...

I'm not saying it's not possible to design a system like this, I'm just highlighting how difficult it is to do it right. Just remember - Firaxis, which has a set of top game designers and tonns of playtest for each featured, wasn't unable to implement world council right in any of their games so far.

 

[Krikkit1]

Expectations: You don't need to conquer your allies to get conquest victory
Reality: You attack your allies, so they can't claim your victory for themselves through diplomatic methods
This looks more and more clumsy...

I'm not saying it's not possible to design a system like this, I'm just highlighting how difficult it is to do it right. Just remember - Firaxis, which has a set of top game designers and tonns of playtest for each featured, wasn't unable to implement world council right in any of their games so far.

If you want a true Diplomatic Victory it has to be a shared one. ie all non-vassals are in alliance with ?and same ideology as? all other non vassals and they all win.

Otherwise your your “Diplomatic “
victory is
1. I have X times more influence than everyone else (and use it to get the win)
AND
2. my military is big enough that they are afraid to attack me (along with the massive diplomatic penalties of attacking an ally)

Which fits with a UN Domination Victory (ie the UN is the military victory)

 

[stealth_nsk]

If you want a true Diplomatic Victory it has to be a shared one. ie all non-vassals are in alliance with ?and same ideology as? all other non vassals and they all win.

Otherwise your your “Diplomatic “
victory is
1. I have X times more influence than everyone else (and use it to get the win)
AND
2. my military is big enough that they are afraid to attack me (along with the massive diplomatic penalties of attacking an ally)

Yep, that's the main problem - Civ always was a single winner game. If they ever implement a shared diplomatic victory, they need an achievement for all civilization win through being allies. This achievement would need My Little Pony icon.

 

[Josephias]

If you want a true Diplomatic Victory it has to be a shared one

Yes and no. Diplomacy and world congress could be expanded for additional gameplay leading to a diplomatic-play victory (it is an idea I have had for a long time - see quote below if you don’t want to bother with the link), but, is the cost to implement correctly worth it?

My greedy self would like to see a much more complex World Congres, in which you may fight for several "office" positions (the likes of WHO, IMF, UNESCO, ....). Each office will allow you to propose different resolutions based on its kind, and topping all positions would be the diplomatic victory. You should also have some rules you could not vote against an ally, or not vote against someone helding an office with a resolution you voted in favour of / is benefiting you... that would lead to a more complicated diplomatic gameplay wich might or might not be interesting.

Add to that, that to mantain offices you already have, you would need to propose resolutions that are not rejected, and/or demonstrate overall statistical benefit of the ones that do. This is, you may need propose resolutions that may not benefit you, and involve yourself and your allies in them being effective. That is: demonstrate you are governing the world, not only your civ.

 

[SeelingCat]

Too brief to say for sure. Cyrus in Civ6 was speaking very bad Middle Persian (poorly spoken and poorly written), and I'm tempted to say Xerxes sounds similar (possibly even the same VA). It doesn't sound like proper Old Persian or Middle Persian to me--notably the presence of the phoneme /v/, which is not in either language.

This might be way off, but it might be something approximating Old Persian. I've found that romanization schemes for Old Persian tend to use "v" (as opposed to Middle Persian, where "w" is more consistently used) - maybe this influenced the pronunciation?

I think the second word might be related to 𐎭𐎼𐎢𐎥 drauga/d-r-u-g "lie" (which turns into druxš/druj in Avestan, as the opposition to an asha in Zoroastrianism) or one of its descendants?

A shot in the dark for sure with how little we hear of Xerxes though

 

[Zaarin]

This might be way off, but it might be something approximating Old Persian. I've found that romanization schemes for Old Persian tend to use "v" (as opposed to Middle Persian, where "w" is more consistently used) - maybe this influenced the pronunciation?

I think the second word might be related to 𐎭𐎼𐎢𐎥 drauga/d-r-u-g "lie" (which turns into druxš/druj in Avestan, as the opposition to an asha in Zoroastrianism) or one of its descendants?

A shot in the dark for sure with how little we hear of Xerxes though

You're correct that /w/ is usually transliterated as <v> in Old Persian so you might be right. I also hear /e/, which is harder to explain (since I also hear /ai/), but the morphology sounds Old Persian. Could just be the VA's pronunciation is not the best; hard to judge from a brief snippet.

 

[j51]

You're correct that /w/ is usually transliterated as <v> in Old Persian so you might be right. I also hear /e/, which is harder to explain (since I also hear /ai/), but the morphology sounds Old Persian. Could just be the VA's pronunciation is not the best; hard to judge from a brief snippet.

I don’t want to derail the thread but where do you two go to learn so much about historical linguistics? What’s a good place to start?

 

[notNamed]

Firaxis just confirmed it's Avestan on the reddit thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1gbf0v8/comment/ltoquzl

 

[Zaarin]

I don’t want to derail the thread but where do you two go to learn so much about historical linguistics? What’s a good place to start?

Wikipedia actually isn't a bad place to start; its linguistics articles aren't the worst.

Firaxis just confirmed it's Avestan on the reddit thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/1gbf0v8/comment/ltoquzl

That explains /e/, but the /v/ is still mispronounced then.

 

[Siptah]

Xerxes looks mighty interesting, especially the Achaemenid persona for me.

To be honest, the marketing strategy and decisions seem to work great on me. When the editions were announced, I was skeptical if I would go with something else than standard, as the savings from the package wrt dlc packages are unclear and I thought will be diminished by the fact that I'm somehow paying for cosmetics and personas that I don't care for. Seeing the first two personas of the four included in the founder's edition now makes me want to get exactly that. These two are among the most interesting revealed so far and, in contrast to civ VI, I think the value of a persona is very close to that of a new leader or a new civ, and not a mere gimmick that I don't care for.

So, do I surrender to Ashoka World Conqueror and Xerxes The Achaemenid - or to FXS and 2K?

 

[Zaarin]

Xerxes looks mighty interesting, especially the Achaemenid persona for me.

To be honest, the marketing strategy and decisions seem to work great on me. When the editions were announced, I was skeptical if I would go with something else than standard, as the savings from the package wrt dlc packages are unclear and I thought will be diminished by the fact that I'm somehow paying for cosmetics and personas that I don't care for. Seeing the first two personas of the four included in the founder's edition now makes me want to get exactly that. These two are among the most interesting revealed so far and, in contrast to civ VI, I think the value of a persona is very close to that of a new leader or a new civ, and not a mere gimmick that I don't care for.

So, do I surrender to Ashoka World Conqueror and Xerxes The Achaemenid - or to FXS and 2K?

I felt the same way. I wasn't fond of the announcement of personae, but I really like the ones we've seen.

 

[Jkchart]

God he looks FANTASTIC

Their leaders they keep showing just keep getting better, visually and interest-wise

 

[stealth_nsk]

Xerxes looks mighty interesting, especially the Achaemenid persona for me.

To be honest, the marketing strategy and decisions seem to work great on me. When the editions were announced, I was skeptical if I would go with something else than standard, as the savings from the package wrt dlc packages are unclear and I thought will be diminished by the fact that I'm somehow paying for cosmetics and personas that I don't care for. Seeing the first two personas of the four included in the founder's edition now makes me want to get exactly that. These two are among the most interesting revealed so far and, in contrast to civ VI, I think the value of a persona is very close to that of a new leader or a new civ, and not a mere gimmick that I don't care for.

So, do I surrender to Ashoka World Conqueror and Xerxes The Achaemenid - or to FXS and 2K?

Yes, Personas are a cool way to add more leader variety without spending too much on 3D models, animations, translations and voice actors. Totally fit DLC content.

 

[Siptah]

translations and voice actors

I assume the personas have voice acting in civ 7 and I expect the same voice actor for both personas (makes sense and saves money). But in the case of the two Ashokas, I think the intro line doesn't work well for the World Conqueror. Hence, at least some lines, and if it just the introductory one, should be unique to the personas (I would prefer all of them to be unique, of course).

 

[Zaarin]

I assume the personas have voice acting in civ 7 and I expect the same voice actor for both personas (makes sense and saves money). But in the case of the two Ashokas, I think the intro line doesn't work well for the World Conqueror. Hence, at least some lines, and if it just the introductory one, should be unique to the personas (I would prefer all of them to be unique, of course).

Hard to tell, but it looked like Ashoka World Conqueror had slightly different animations from Ashoka World Renouncer, and I, too, would think he wouldn't introduce himself as a great sinner. It at least looks like Civ7 personae have more effort put into them than their Civ6 counterparts.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I assume the personas have voice acting in civ 7 and I expect the same voice actor for both personas (makes sense and saves money). But in the case of the two Ashokas, I think the intro line doesn't work well for the World Conqueror. Hence, at least some lines, and if it just the introductory one, should be unique to the personas (I would prefer all of them to be unique, of course).

Yes, it's not zero cost, but much lower. You could use the same translators and voice actors, which is dramatically cheaper than hiring new people. If they use MoCap, they also could use the same actors.

 

[AriochIV]

That's quite complicated topic as it blurs the line between domination and diplomatic victory. Potential solution could be "vassals" instead of "allies", so those allied civ need to accept your lead as dominant military force. Not sure if such system is worth implementing and how well it fits the current diplomacy.

It's not complicated at all... the Domination victory condition used to be very simple: getting a certain overwhelming majority of population and territory, and that worked very well. Ever since they changed it to having to conquer all the other capitals, it's become a strange ahistorical caricature of what conqueror nations do, as well as a game condition that's just not worth the hassle of achieving. When you've got 2/3 or 3/5 (or whatever it was) of population and territory, the game is over... and making you grind out those last few capitals (which often means turning on your allies) is a) boring, and b) nonsensical... when a nation is that powerful, they rule through intimidation as much as outright conquest.

Hopefully since an important goal of Civ7 seems to be eliminating pointless endgame grind, they will address this issue.

 

[Zaarin]

It's not complicated at all... the Domination victory condition used to be very simple: getting a certain overwhelming majority of population and territory, and that worked very well. Ever since they changed it to having to conquer all the other capitals, it's become a strange ahistorical caricature of what conqueror nations do, as well as a game condition that's just not worth the hassle of achieving. When you've got 2/3 or 3/5 (or whatever it was) of population and territory, the game is over... and making you grind out those last few capitals (which often means turning on your allies) is a) boring, and b) nonsensical... when a nation is that powerful, they rule through intimidation as much as outright conquest.

Hopefully since an important goal of Civ7 seems to be eliminating pointless endgame grind, they will address this issue.

We know that the Antiquity Domination Legacy Path doesn't even require conquest (just is a lot harder without it), just owning a certain number of cities, so here's hoping that's a trend.

 

[stealth_nsk]

It's not complicated at all... the Domination victory condition used to be very simple: getting a certain overwhelming majority of population and territory, and that worked very well. Ever since they changed it to having to conquer all the other capitals, it's become a strange ahistorical caricature of what conqueror nations do, as well as a game condition that's just not worth the hassle of achieving. When you've got 2/3 or 3/5 (or whatever it was) of population and territory, the game is over... and making you grind out those last few capitals (which often means turning on your allies) is a) boring, and b) nonsensical... when a nation is that powerful, they rule through intimidation as much as outright conquest.

Hopefully since an important goal of Civ7 seems to be eliminating pointless endgame grind, they will address this issue.

The original conquest victory was to capture all cities (I still remember searching for this last city AI found on a remote island). The solution you're describing was in Civ 3 and 4 only. It was scrapped with the introduction of tall gameplay viability as incompatible. And while Civ 6 and 7 are not that focused on tall gameplay as Civ 5 (luckily), they still allow this playstyle.

 

[AriochIV]

The original conquest victory was to capture all cities (I still remember searching for this last city AI found on a remote island). The solution you're describing was in Civ 3 and 4 only. It was scrapped with the introduction of tall gameplay viability as incompatible. And while Civ 6 and 7 are not that focused on tall gameplay as Civ 5 (luckily), they still allow this playstyle.

Yes, the Conquest and Domination were two different victory conditions, but the Conquest condition was pointless since you'd reach the Domination condition first.

Ironically, a working diplomatic system is what's needed to allow peaceful empires to compete against conquerors, but that's what Civilization has never yet had.