Old timer's, what are your thoughts so far?

Since you go all the way back, what did you think of the Civ 1 method of stacks?

 

I started with Civ 1 the day it came out, have played every version that followed and enjoyed them all. no game if perfect, but i enjoyed them all. i still get the 'one more turn' feeling. i still remember my feeling in I, when i was playing on real earth, had settled north and south America and was building the space craft. I had no threats.. until Zulu captured a city stole space flight and built a one engine space ship and launched it. i still have a bias against Zulu. the only think i really disliked was the insane AI drive to settle more land in III. i look forward to VI

 

Who needs stacks when 2-3 chariots will conquer the continent? But I like the 1UPT especially with city HP and bombardment. With escorts, support units and less workers running around it may even work.

 

I can't seem to remember where I am...

So far, the information we've got sounds promising, but I'll try before I buy. I just hope Firaxis will improve their efforts on bug fixing. We've still got stuff like this in Civ V:

 

They didn't just take a sledgehammer to the old mechanics, they took a sledgehammer to 1 UPT in Civ V.

If the game had more reasonable cycling, legitimate input buffering, could keep up with human orders (.....), and had some conventions for grouping units it would play so much smoother.

I've seen rookies to the series going back to IV and complaining about the micro of transports, but there is no question moving even large stacks over water in IV takes less total #commands than V by a significant margin. That's true across the board, even in places it should be identical like city management.

V made no serious effort in UI design and the gameplay regressed in that fashion. I don't think it's fair to entirely blame 1UPT for the result. It's not surprising that you have inconvenience in unit control when no serious effort was put into the UI or controls in general.

I know I've made the point before, but compare the minimum number of inputs to queue up 3 units and a building in a Civ 4 city and a Civ V city in sequence, as well as changing something in the sequence four turns later. It's sad just how bad the newer game is at it, and that's partially why 1 UPT control sucks too.

 

I started playing Civ I with a friend in a basement oh so many years ago, early 90s it must have been. Hooked. Played Civ2 when it came out a lot. Great game. Civ3 I played a lot but it had some issues that annoyed me. Civ4 came out, it was decent, but with the expansions it became the greatest game in the series. It had everything, increased complexity for my maturing tastes, great replayability, there was a large and active online-community that I played with for years, we even developed the Diplo-game genre into an art-form.

But on the change from 4 to 5 something happened. I remember seeing an hour-long video with Sid Meier himself where he talked about game design for CivRev. And I noticed certain things, things that I had thought about during 4, but that started to worry and irritate me more and more as 5 was released. There has been a shift in tone, on many levels. One is the endless flood of DLC. I detest that model of marketing. That aside, another move I really didn't like was narrowing the leader and skills down too much. No longer the flexibility of Industrious/Expansive or Charismatic/Financial(nerf) which meant you could play to your strengths in different ways in each game, in civ5 to maximize your leader's ability you had to stay on a narrow path, ruining replayability. Another bummer was the 1 unit per tile system, strangely, going back to civ4 feels weird and clunky now, but the 1 unit per tile causes huge problems for the AI that can't handle amphibious invasions or chokeholds, effectively limiting any real threat from the AI. Another issue that followed that was the linearization of buildings, most new buildings were merely improvements on older ones, as were technology. Suddenly I felt railroaded in the tech tree, in city development, in war, in everything. The expansions certainly helped a lot, but the game had lost me and I never got inspired by it the way I did with civ4.

But an interesting note regarding Sid Meier's talk was how he came to the idea of putting golden ages into civ4. Originally they were meant to be dark ages, a time of decline for your civ, but players didn't like it and would just reload out of it or start over. Another issue that popped up was that when attacking with a valuable unit and losing (how many have not raged over the +98% chance of winning odds presented and then losing) players would save before combat and just reload, so the game designer had to implement the locked combat seed to avoid it. And that's when it hit me, what really made me lose interest in civ. The reason the player feels the need to reload when a battle is lost, or when things take a turn for the worse is that civ is not a real empire-simulator. It's a car-racing game. You start off and the goal is to keep your development speed up constantly accelerating, if it falls behind, then you will not win the game, there is no incentive to keep playing a mid-line civ, you can never catch up because other players or the AI will never slow down. That's not history, that's a simple drag race.

Perhaps it had to do with me studying history (and other subjects) at university in the meantime, but I came to resent the feeling that I was merely trying to win a race, not develop an empire. History is full of dead-ends and critical mistakes that change the course of history. Britain losing the American colonies for example, in a civ game England would just up and quit or reload, there would be no way they could re-gain the loss compared to the development of other civs. And that's where the interesting things in history come from, the weird twists and turns, the dead-ends. Rome grew mighty, then collapsed, new empires arose from its ashes. Such developments are effectively impossible in civ. The mighty stay mighty. I would have loved to see a mechanic that involves trade-offs. Great size would mean great instability, not just a loss of happiness. Trading all over the world would increase the chance of epidemics. Culture would be a tool to stabilize your empire not just spread it. And so on. And setbacks would be acceptable if you knew your opponents would eventually encounter their own hinders. But Civ5 went towards simplifying rather than increasing complexity. And so I've lost interest.

Now I play Paradox games instead, but I would love to see a dynamic and complex Civ6. Unfortunately I suspect they'll keep dumbing it down, making it more and more linear and less and less like an empire simulator and more and more like Age of Empires turn-based.

 

In a now long-lost stream, I teched pottery and writing in 1000 AD as Mali after a badly botched skirmisher rush on immortal/normal. A lot of things happened, lost wars and problems. I had to shut down a culture victory first. When my nuked and barely-alive unit walked into the Chinese capital before their space ship landed, I completed the most improbable comeback I've ever managed in a civ title.

The potential for comeback was designed into IV. Tech trade junk mechanic, espionage, military are all there to combat the "drag race".

The important thing in a strategy game is that you're making choices that matter frequently. Little random stuff here and there is trivial by comparison and done poorly can make the game worse outright.

Not everyone save scums, and there is no need to do it. Players will do it either to cheat on purpose or because they feel cheated; IE they made (in their estimation, accurate or not) the correct choices and are being penalized regardless. Losing a 98% battle is an example of the latter, though it usually isn't justified. At least, that's what I would say after collateral damage exists. Before that, no cost/risk ratio can be chosen to avoid losing to RNG and that's bad design, one area where Civ V soundly trumps Civ IV. There should not be scenarios where RNG alone makes you lose outright, but in competitive situations in Civ IV your opponent can *force* that as a factor.

Now THAT's an amusing thing to say, considering what Paradox has done to player agency in recent patches/games.

 

Thing is MeIn, respectfully, they needed the player to have "things to do", no matter the nature of these. Sad, yes.

 

Four extra clicks or keyboard presses to accomplish the same thing as the previous title is a wrong decision.

It's not like one has to carefully consider whether they want to click into the city to change the queue.

I doubt that was Firaxis' motivation for the shoddy UI, to conclude that a shoddy UI would allow the player physically more inputs and thus "more to do". If it was, they were presented with a false choice and took the false choice .

 

Of course man, there was a little, not too obvious to come as offensive, irony in my statement. Sorry.

 

Ah my bad, I'm not 100% right now for a few reasons.

 

I play both Paradox history sims as well as Civ. Both have their place, I think, and can be fun without the exclusion of the other.

 

One thing about 1upt it forces the AI ( or player) to plan his battles and you can only bring a certain number of units to surround a city. when they brought up a stack of 60 artillery or 60 tanks ... i have had sever good amphibious invasions planned against me in V, but i keep a strong navy and can take out most of the units before they get to land. however, when they came in a stack of doom, it was impossible to sink them all, since AI can build many more units than i can, the 1upt gave me a better chance to defend. and planned well. a more realistic deploy of an army.

 

That's wrong.
ToT included multiple maps, which no other Civ game has, but akin to the twin maps of MoM. That single feature makes it more than a reskin.

 

I loved the fantasy campaign. That was super fun. Civ II was awesome and ToT made it even better. Just like cIV was wonderful and Fall from Heaven I and II made it mind blowingly great.

 

Civ 1 since I was 12 years old!

Although really excited with the news of the release of CIV 6, and the screens and all content and features, this time I won't buy at release...I was sneaked when I paid 50e for CIV 5 vanila only to find out it only had better graphics than Civ 4...only after the expansions I found 5 playable, so this time I'll wait till I see the product that deserves my 60e more than my other needs.

 

Started with Civ2 on the PS, played that and 3 to death, for some reason I can't recall I didn't play 4 much but love Civ5 BNW.

I'm always excited about a new Civ, BE should have been my dream game but it was such a crushing disappointment, but I have high expectations for Civ6, it looks great. I just hope they sort out the soul-destroying turn times late in the game on the longest game speeds/biggest map sizes.

 

Where if the strongest defender died, the whole stack died? It sucked when you'd made a mistake and lose a heap of units that way, but it worked both ways too, you could kill a heap of enemy units the same way.
However, on the whole I preferred that to a 1UPT system. I think TMIT identifies the issues I have with Civ5 better than I myself wrote.

Minor rant, I loved that in Civ4 you could quickly quit the city screen by pressing the greyed out margin around the fat cross in the middle of the screen. So quick and painless.

I'm a stickler for UI design, and you're right, Civ5 devs made a poorer attempt at a functional UI than Civ4. It didn't help that Civ5's engine was more sluggish too. The main thing I can think of it did better than Civ4 was its Zoom-To-Cursor, something I loved ever since I first saw in Supreme Commander.

I'm not sure that UI features, just like good AI, sells copies though, so I don't have high hopes for VI.

 

Even better was that you could change your queue or governor focus without even entering the city screen. Literally just click on city name --> click on something to build, 2 inputs. Adding to queue just required holding shift first, or control to put something at top, still 2 inputs.

You could then immediately give different orders to units or click on another city, and not have to kick your way through windows. Better still...it was possible to select + do this with multiple cities at the same time (so if you want to queue universities in all cities, STILL two inputs...).

They're a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to implement though, given that games from 1990's outperform Civ 5 in UI but AI sucks in pretty much every game with complexity I've played.

I have poor hopes for Civ 6 though. UI is not something Firaxis has any track record of even being average. It's way behind their ability in other aspects of game design historically, and I don't see a good reason to believe 6 will suddenly leap forward with 5 having stayed in a pathetic state until this point.

And yes, I mean it when I say pathetic. That's what you get when the game forcibly ignores player inputs to unselect units or only input buffers...sometimes, all while doubling the #inputs from previous title in many cases.

 

At least civ6 ui seems to show more than civ5 ui. Hope civ6 ui will be modable so that we can get a civ6 version of eui.

Although when it comes to inputs its another matter. I d like at least no lag and smooth control...