Official announcement: Hot off the presses. Next Civ game in development!!!!!!!

[Saxo Grammaticus]

To be fair, I am actually rather a fan of combat in Humankind As I have said elsewhere, Humankind is really three games: the Neolithic, the map, and the tactical battle map. It surprised me that I would enjoy tactical combat so much, but it really plays to a certain brute force, immersive strength of mine. They do a lot of things right. For one, you can build units There is a pronounced shift from melee to ranged that changes how the AI fights. It also has enough depth to provoke tactical and strategic considerations, giving battles inherent meaning. A generic siege in Humankind is more impactful to me than any combat in Civilization VI bar vanquishing Beowulf.

That said, combat is unwieldy in many ways. The tendency for the AI to ambush the player at the start of the turn seems counterproductive--evading AI combat does take some expertise. Fighting in empty cities as I previously alluded to does not seem like intentional game design, but I could be wrong.

I would be interested in some multiplayer tournament where players faced off one-on-one to play two sides of a combat scenario. The units for each side would remain consistent, but perhaps there would be some leeway for initiating combat. This way you could better see the different approaches player take.

 

[Xur]

Combat has never been particularly fun or good in any civ game. Combat isn’t what attracts players. The goal should be: not annoy players with poor AI or tedious combat.

I personally think civ6 has the most tedious and click-annoying combat of all version. I’d rather have a limited stack of doom - maybe 10 units combined into 1 moveable army. Simple, quick and something the AI can handle.

 

[kaspergm]

Have you played Humankind? Because it is not how it works, in fact: when stacks meet on the campaign map, the separate 'battlefield arena' is delineated on the campaign map, within which you wage actual battle, the borders of which limit such things as retreat and reinforcements (I don't know how to describe it better). You don't fight on a separate map in a separate minigame. So it's an interesting hybrid solution between direct on-map warfare of 1UPT and separate combat maps, as you combine tactical battles, logistical simplicity, and everything happening on the same map, without HoMM style separate battle maps.

The fundamental idea is imho great Humankind's issues mainly involved terrible interface, map readibility (seven elevation levels gg), unclear rules, and way too many units compared to the size of those arenas, so they get completely cluttered very quickly.

Yeah, I have played Humankind. My point was, you listed all the problems with how the minimap of combat replicates the obstacles of the macromap, and that this points towards a system like Heroes of Might and Magic where the combat mat is not actually a 1:1 replication of the macromap.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Both of your comments actually managed to convince me slightly against Humankind's combat system... which had been the only major aspect of this game which I haven't criticized on a fundamental level

I've been on both sides. I really, really liked the tactical battle system of Humankind when I first saw it during play-testing/development and early after release of the game.
But then, I'm a professional military historian who writes archive-researched combat narratives - it's kind of asking an avalanche if it likes going downhill: it's What We Do.

The problems within the system became more and more evident the longer I played, however, and while I still vastly prefer it to Civ V/VI's 1UPT, which if I were at all religious I would burn at the nearest stake, I am more and more convinced that the tactical scale, no matter how you massage it, just does not belong in a game at the time scale of Civ.

Tactics does not occur at an Annual rate.

Trying to be all things to all players: tactical, operational, strategic, economic, religious, political, cultural, etc means you don't do much of anything very well.

At least, at the annual plus time scale of Civ games, religious, cultural, economic, political changes are not extremely ridiculous to the time scale. Tactical battles, that take place in 1/365th of the minimum turn interval, are very much harder to justify, especially if you sub-divide the battle into several back and forth turns: now you are playing sub-turns measured in Hours when the rest of the game measures times in Years or Decades.

BUT

Simply abstracting everything between declaring war and declaring victory because before the Industrial Era it all takes place in 1 - 2 turns is just not very satisfying, unless you also abstract all the developing of military systems and weapons and building of units, generals, and all the effects of military activities on the rest of the population and civilization. That reduces an awful lot of the game to Abstraction and starts to make you wonder why you bothered to play at all.

I've already posted what I think would be the minimum level of interaction between player and battlefield that would sort of meld the Grand Strategic regular game with some kind of battle replication, but whether anybody on any design team agrees is another matter . . .

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Age of Wonders 4, albeit a fantasy 4x game, also utilizes the concept of a separate map for combat. The combat map uses procedurally generated terrain based on the type of terrain and improvements in the province where the two armies meet. I think it's rather impressive. It certainly helps the scale issues that arise with 1UPT. On the world map, armies consist of up to six units on a tile. In the combat map, it's 1UPT and the people are not bigger than the buildings they may be fighting around.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

"Separate map for combat" just conjures up this image in my head:

Not the same thing to be fair, but I will always try to find an excuse to bring up Call To Power into any civ-related discussion

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

"Separate map for combat" just conjures up this image in my head:

Not the same thing to be fair, but I will always try to find an excuse to bring up Call To Power into any civ-related discussion

At the time, Call to Power was full of innovative and intriguing ideas on how to do Civ-type 4x games, like this 'battle map' system.

Unfortunately, almost all of them were execrably badly implemented, to the point of looking in some cases like parodies of Civ.
The two I remember most vividly were that bombers took 5 years to reach their target and Food Workers in orbital cities showed the same farmer hoeing his open field graphic as ancient cities: nary a dome or bubble or hydroponics tray in sight!

 

[Krajzen]

Personally I have always been weirded out by CtP's insistence on a huge part of the game being faraway future - and, to make it worse, very cartoonish and honestly imo cheesy and bland vision of the future.

Historical 4X games are built around the cast of historical cultures, unique abilities of those cultures, historical buildings and people and tropes, and some generic uninspired sci fi looks really bad in comparision. By the time you reach any 'future era' in such games, historical cultures have no more historical toys to offer, and they tend to lose distinctiveness, just blending into generic 'futuristic skyscrapers technocracy/ecocracy/whatever' without any discernible flavour, building generic 'big techno projects' instead of Taj Mahal. And creating interesting futurology requires a lot of inspiration and effort on the other hand, which could be spent elsewhere, so personally I just prefer for those games to end around the proverbial year 2050.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Personally I have always been weirded out by CtP's insistence on a huge part of the game being faraway future - and, to make it worse, very cartoonish and honestly imo cheesy and bland vision of the future.

Historical 4X games are built around the cast of historical cultures, unique abilities of those cultures, historical buildings and people and tropes, and some generic uninspired sci fi looks really bad in comparision. By the time you reach any 'future era' in such games, historical cultures have no more historical toys to offer, and they tend to lose distinctiveness, just blending into generic 'futuristic skyscrapers technocracy/ecocracy/whatever' without any discernible flavour, building generic 'big techno projects' instead of Taj Mahal. And creating interesting futurology requires a lot of inspiration and effort on the other hand, which could be spent elsewhere, so personally I just prefer for those games to end around the proverbial year 2050.

I've posted on this before, but it bears repeating if anybody at Firaxis is reading: predicting the future is HARD. 'Hard' Science Fiction writers, who are trying to make a living at this and therefore attempting it virtually Full Time, have at best a mediocre track record:
1. In all the stories about going to the moon, nobody ever predicted the first moon landing would be Televised.
2. In the 1960s, nobody ever predicted that the two cutting edge technologies: Lasers and Radar, would be two of the most common household appliances less than 20 years later: CD players and microwave ovens.
3. In all the stories about space flight, no one ever predicted that we would go to the moon, explore, and then ignore it for 30 years.

- and on, and on. All of this makes any attempt to make even near-term predictions a minefield in which predictions may blow up in your face at any minute. As much as I am unsatisfied by generic Future Tech, too often the alternative is Fantasy Tech in a game that has enough Historical Fantasy in it already, thankyouverymuch.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

Personally I have always been weirded out by CtP's insistence on a huge part of the game being faraway future - and, to make it worse, very cartoonish and honestly imo cheesy and bland vision of the future.

Historical 4X games are built around the cast of historical cultures, unique abilities of those cultures, historical buildings and people and tropes, and some generic uninspired sci fi looks really bad in comparision. By the time you reach any 'future era' in such games, historical cultures have no more historical toys to offer, and they tend to lose distinctiveness, just blending into generic 'futuristic skyscrapers technocracy/ecocracy/whatever' without any discernible flavour, building generic 'big techno projects' instead of Taj Mahal. And creating interesting futurology requires a lot of inspiration and effort on the other hand, which could be spent elsewhere, so personally I just prefer for those games to end around the proverbial year 2050.

Kind of surprised you called it bland, since from my own experiences, playing the game made A LOT of popular sci fi look bland by comparison for me. If anything, CtP's biggest pitfall for me, was that it didn't go far enough with depicting all the transhumanism, nanotechnology, hyperdimensional geometry etc; I've always treated the historical aspects of civ as a prelude, with geography and sociology being a lot more important for me

I've posted on this before, but it bears repeating if anybody at Firaxis is reading: predicting the future is HARD. 'Hard' Science Fiction writers, who are trying to make a living at this and therefore attempting it virtually Full Time, have at best a mediocre track record:
1. In all the stories about going to the moon, nobody ever predicted the first moon landing would be Televised.
2. In the 1960s, nobody ever predicted that the two cutting edge technologies: Lasers and Radar, would be two of the most common household appliances less than 20 years later: CD players and microwave ovens.
3. In all the stories about space flight, no one ever predicted that we would go to the moon, explore, and then ignore it for 30 years.

- and on, and on. All of this makes any attempt to make even near-term predictions a minefield in which predictions may blow up in your face at any minute. As much as I am unsatisfied by generic Future Tech, too often the alternative is Fantasy Tech in a game that has enough Historical Fantasy in it already, thankyouverymuch.

I honestly think giving up on predicting the future for the sake of accuracy is pretty cowardly, and also kind of misses the forest for the trees. The best scifi out there isn't about the tech itself, but rather people's relationship to it. It wouldn't be surprising, if it turned out a big reason most futurists have largely failed predicting the future over the years, is because most of them, or at least the writers that have inspired them, have a military background; they've mostly drawn their inspiration from the time they served as engineers in the army/navy/air force/etc. So as you can probably guess, if you want more "accurate" (or at least more inspired) future era in the game, my advice to whatever studio making making the game, would be to simply hire writers with a more explicit background in the humanities.

On a slightly related note, OSP not too long ago made video about how the evolution of telecommunication has affected storytelling (a lot of tropes that relied on the lack of communication, are now either obsolete or have to be addressed head on):

 

[Patine]

1. In all the stories about going to the moon, nobody ever predicted the first moon landing would be Televised.

Well, apparently the, "Revolution," won't be, but then again, that, too, is just a preditction and postulation of the future (and probably a whistful one, given Gil Scott Heron's Black Panther Party heritage and the type of Revolution we fully envisioned).

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Kind of surprised you called it bland, since from my own experiences, playing the game made A LOT of popular sci fi look bland by comparison for me. If anything, CtP's biggest pitfall for me, was that it didn't go far enough with depicting all the transhumanism, nanotechnology, hyperdimensional geometry etc; I've always treated the historical aspects of civ as a prelude, with geography and sociology being a lot more important for me

John W. Campbell, the great editor of the old Astounding Science Fiction/Fact (later Analog) magazine, who was also a pretty well-respected author of science fiction before he took over editing, once postulated that forecasting more than 15 - 25 years in the future was impossible because of 'singularity events'. Meaning, that elements of technology would change so completely that their effects on culture, people, and technological applications become impossible to predict. You can predict certain trends, but you will never get all the details right, because, especially now, you are trying to predict human reactions to them that spring from numerous different cultural backgrounds and the interactions between/among those cultures and polities.
Not that it shouldn't be attempted, just that no one should expect to get it mostly right.

On a slightly related note, OSP not too long ago made video about how the evolution of telecommunication has affected storytelling (a lot of tropes that relied on the lack of communication, are now either obsolete or have to be addressed head on):

There's an even better example, and one that illustrates how even attempting to predict changes what you are trying to predict.
Several years ago, William Shatner wrote a book called I'm Working on That, which basically detailed all the technologies depicted in the Star Trek shows that real engineers and scientists had told him made them start working on duplicating them. The big one, of course, was the 'communicators' of the original series in the 1960s which were surpassed by modern smart phones centuries before the TV writers thought they would be. Likewise, the 'Tricorders' medical imaging technology, beam weapons, the Holodeck (I had a friend who watched a demo of a Holodeck over 15 years ago - it's coming!) etc. So, fictional extrapolation has influenced actual 'Future Tech' applications and developments.

 

[Patine]

Kind of surprised you called it bland, since from my own experiences, playing the game made A LOT of popular sci fi look bland by comparison for me. If anything, CtP's biggest pitfall for me, was that it didn't go far enough with depicting all the transhumanism, nanotechnology, hyperdimensional geometry etc; I've always treated the historical aspects of civ as a prelude, with geography and sociology being a lot more important for me


I honestly think giving up on predicting the future for the sake of accuracy is pretty cowardly, and also kind of misses the forest for the trees. The best scifi out there isn't about the tech itself, but rather people's relationship to it. It wouldn't be surprising, if it turned out a big reason most futurists have largely failed predicting the future over the years, is because most of them, or at least the writers that have inspired them, have a military background; they've mostly drawn their inspiration from the time they served as engineers in the army/navy/air force/etc. So as you can probably guess, if you want more "accurate" (or at least more inspired) future era in the game, my advice to whatever studio making making the game, would be to simply hire writers with a more explicit background in the humanities.

On a slightly related note, OSP not too long ago made video about how the evolution of telecommunication has affected storytelling (a lot of tropes that relied on the lack of communication, are now either obsolete or have to be addressed head on):

John W. Campbell, the great editor of the old Astounding Science Fiction/Fact (later Analog) magazine, who was also a pretty well-respected author of science fiction before he took over editing, once postulated that forecasting more than 15 - 25 years in the future was impossible because of 'singularity events'. Meaning, that elements of technology would change so completely that their effects on culture, people, and technological applications become impossible to predict. You can predict certain trends, but you will never get all the details right, because, especially now, you are trying to predict human reactions to them that spring from numerous different cultural backgrounds and the interactions between/among those cultures and polities.
Not that it shouldn't be attempted, just that no one should expect to get it mostly right.


There's an even better example, and one that illustrates how even attempting to predict changes what you are trying to predict.
Several years ago, William Shatner wrote a book called I'm Working on That, which basically detailed all the technologies depicted in the Star Trek shows that real engineers and scientists had told him made them start working on duplicating them. The big one, of course, was the 'communicators' of the original series in the 1960s which were surpassed by modern smart phones centuries before the TV writers thought they would be. Likewise, the 'Tricorders' medical imaging technology, beam weapons, the Holodeck (I had a friend who watched a demo of a Holodeck over 15 years ago - it's coming!) etc. So, fictional extrapolation has influenced actual 'Future Tech' applications and developments.

Also, the very obvious fact that mosr science fiction authors, show-runners, movie creators/producers, and graphic novelists do not, and have not for several decades, made their works in a SERIOUS attempt to predict the future - but as a vehicle for a personal narrative, socio-political viewpoint, or message, or just for pure storytelling purposes as much so as any outright fantasy work.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

The big one, of course, was the 'communicators' of the original series in the 1960s which were surpassed by modern smart phones centuries before the TV writers thought they would be. Likewise, the 'Tricorders' medical imaging technology, beam weapons, the Holodeck (I had a friend who watched a demo of a Holodeck over 15 years ago - it's coming!) etc. So, fictional extrapolation has influenced actual 'Future Tech' applications and developments.

What if I told you the those pre-cellphones were based on then-already existing technology Gene Roddenberry saw and used during his time in the air force? Like, a lot of tech in sci-fi in general is just that: depictions of concepts that scientists had already been discussing about for years by then, if not outright made flesh in the skunkworks.

Also, the very obvious fact that mosr science fiction authors, show-runners, movie creators/producers, and graphic novelists do not, and have not for several decades, made their works in a SERIOUS attempt to predict the future - but as a vehicle for a personal narrative, socio-political viewpoint, or message, or just for pure storytelling purposes as much so as any outright fantasy work.

Again, I must stress that, many of the most prolific authors from the golden age of science fiction, either directly served the US military during WW2 as engineers, or worked indirectly for them as scientists, which is where they've gotten most of their inspirations; I honestly think that golden age has ended, is because the military side of things has become an exhausted well for inspiration, hence why I'd argue we should look for other sources (if we even need to, that is...) Even then, the truly original concepts only show up for plot convenience reasons. Returning to Star Trek, the holodeck e.g. is just an excuse for the writers to put the starfleet in a costume drama; the Enterprise only has an FTL drive to explain why it doesn't take literal millennia for the ship to go from one alien race to another; the teleport was only invented because the production team couldn't afford making a vessel prop; and so on.

Anyway, we're getting way off-topic. In case you couldn't tell, I'm clearly in favour of taking civ into the far, far future, if for no other reason than to dispute the idea that history has somehow "ended". And while I don't really agree with @Krajzen otherwise, I do agree it's a bit of a cop-out to depict all the civilizations as aesthetically identical in the future, or even the present. Heck, that's a crime that Civ 4 and forward has been guilty of, I'd argue.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Also, the very obvious fact that mosr science fiction authors, show-runners, movie creators/producers, and graphic novelists do not, and have not for several decades, made their works in a SERIOUS attempt to predict the future - but as a vehicle for a personal narrative, socio-political viewpoint, or message, or just for pure storytelling purposes as much so as any outright fantasy work.

Since I've been reading science fiction since the late 1950s, I can tell you that at no time have science fiction writers as a group been 'predictors' of the future, as much as they have been users of exotic backgrounds for their stories. Those backgrounds, since before I started reading them, have included both the 'real' future and Alternate futures and presents and pasts: and that includes stories written by such official Grand Masters of Science Fiction as Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, and such extremely popular writers in the genre as Randal Garrett, Murray Leinster, Harry Harrison, Gorden Dickson - all from the 'classic' period of science fiction in the 1940s to early 1960s (Pre Tolkien, whose work was a literary Singularity Event for speculative fiction in the USA)

 

[SemiLazyGamer]

Consider the timing of the release of the PS4 and XB1 DLC for Midnight Sun's is on the 11th.

Marvel's Midnight Suns Launching May 11 on PS4 and Xbox One

PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Firaxis' tactical RPG and all four of its post-launch DLC will be available to purchase digitally on May 11.

midnightsuns.2k.com

Coincidence? I think not!

 

[Krajzen]

Coincidence with what?

 

[j51]

Well, apparently the, "Revolution," won't be, but then again, that, too, is just a preditction and postulation of the future (and probably a whistful one, given Gil Scott Heron's Black Panther Party heritage and the type of Revolution we fully envisioned).

+100 for Gil Scott Heron reference.

 

[Yorke]

Consider the timing of the release of the PS4 and XB1 DLC for Midnight Sun's is on the 11th.

Marvel's Midnight Suns Launching May 11 on PS4 and Xbox One

PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Firaxis' tactical RPG and all four of its post-launch DLC will be available to purchase digitally on May 11.

midnightsuns.2k.com

Coincidence? I think not!

I was thinking with myself that all buzz Age of Wonders 4 is generating around the 4x genre plus new content from Stellaris and we are reaching the date when Civ 6 was announced... Makes sense.

Maybe the "soon" update they said about for iOS and Xbox on Windows?

 

[Josephias]

Age of Wonders 4, albeit a fantasy 4x game, also utilizes the concept of a separate map for combat.

Many games do. I see mentioned (and -to say I'm sorry beforehand- I have not read all the posts) quite a bunch, old and new: HoMM, the Age of... Series, Humankind, Call to Power (in the alternate civ-verse),... and I've to add (if anyone said it before), the Total War series, who managed quite an interesting blend of TBS and RTS because of this.

Be wary, however, that the separate "tactical" layer slows down the game noticeably (and, usually, the more complex and satisfactory the tactical layer is, the more it drags from the "grand strategy" overlay). So, I'd say it is quite a compromise to decide if incluiding it or not, and one that should not be taken lightly. I would say if civ has not taken this route already (except for the Call to Power experiments) is because they don't want it to detract from the main game experience.

While I don't say it cannot be done, and that with some refining might be great, I would rather hope they try different things for Civ. And, to suggest something, I have found memories from the 1st installment of a game called Kohan (2nd wanted to be more more mainstream RTS-like and lost the soul of that game). Nevertheless, while both games had you researching/unlocking "units", the items you put in the field were "armies" configured out of the units you had available. Therefore, you could go for a all-infantry army for budget strenght, an all-cavalry army for mobility, a mixed infantry-range army for versatility, a mixed infantry-cavalry to increase line of sight... and so on.
I think something in this direction might help civ with 1upt, by making it 1 army per tile, and ther army having a number of slots made of units, which improved certain stats (in certain sense, it is what humankind does, but instead of "splitting" the army for fights, just make certain rules in which the defense value of the army for a front attack is, in example, that of his more defensive unit, and for a flank attak, that of the second more defensive... that the unit can range attack if it includes archers, etc..
In summary, make 1upt more workable as there will be less "units" in the map, but include the tactical layer in the configuration of these units: ¿should all-cavalry armies be fielded for patrol and pillaging? ¿should invading armies use one or more slots for siege support (at cost of less HP or flanking resistance)?. Make it you can save your presets, and build-queue or "summon" spare units to configure again a configuration you used before.
It has, of course, the risk of adding a layer of complexity that might make the game less mainstream, but on the other hand, I think it has the potential to be quicker and more original than bringing up combat maps everytime you engage (which may seem fun at first, but I guarantee you you end up with 70%+ autoresolve after the first game runs).