should they skip Civ 5 Xpacs and go straight to Civ 6?

[bonafide11]

Me too.



So you are saying that a company is unable to learn from three years of optimizing the predecessor of a game? That there aren't lessons learned?

All what you've done during the past years has been put into the garbage? You've just not learned anything?

Is it that what you're talking about?

Of course they've learned from three years of optimizing the predecessor of a game, but Civ V is a completely different engine than Civ IV. It's not about "learning lessons," it's about programming and developing a game, which takes a considerable about of time. If it took three years last time, how do you expect them to do it in a year this time? It's a different engine, they can't just copy and paste everything from BTS and put it into Civ V.

When Civ IV came out, it lacked features that were in Civ III's final edition. It's not that they didn't learn their lesson, it's that it takes time to program and develop a completely new game from start.

 

[lschnarch]

No, you're talking about UI issues now. I may agree with some or most of complaints about the UI, but they are separate from the discussion of graphics, engine or AI optimisation.

Ok, first you said "not badly optimized" does not refer to the AI, it just refers to the "engine".
Now the user interface (better: the information provided by it) is not important in the context of "not badly optimized", either.

Do you mind explaining what "not badly optimized" then would mean? To me, it seems not much is being left.

 

[Akka]

Because BTS took an additional two years to develop after the release of Civ IV! They didn't have that long to work on Civ V. Programming and testing games takes a lot of time.

You're mixing programming with design.

For now, you need to compare the games vanilla, as that's the only fair comparison.

No, as said before, there is no reason why they would forgot things between Civ4 and Civ5.
When they developped Civ4, they didn't need ten years to improve on Civ3, even though it was the time from Civ1 to Civ3... Following your logic they should have, after all they're supposed to forget everything and start from scratch each time !

Sometimes I wonder about people on this forum...

Yeah, exactly what I was thinking while reading your post

People complained like this about Civ IV when it first came out too.

No.
People complained about the bugs and memory leaks of Civ4 when it came out, but they generally praised the gameplay, design and ideas.
This is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Civ5, which is panned about BOTH the bugs and the design.
It's extremely tiring to see constantly the same misconceptions/lie being sprouted by the blind fans, despite being each time countered.

 

[Akka]

I don't think it is possible for us to know what they were aiming for, unless they come out and tell us. But speculation is fun.

My personal opinion as a professional software engineer, they hit exactly what they were aiming for and the majority of the fans who are disappointed had different expectations than the goals the developers had. The fault is in expecting too much.

I can safely say that dumbing down a game is not the good way of making it richer. The designer can pretend what he wants, I'm trusting more the actual design direction than the claims, and the actual design direction is certainly not "bold" nor "ambitious", as it's based on simplifying the game. Unless it's considered "ambitious" to dumb down something, but if it's the case then I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic meaning of some words.

And my personal opinion is that the expectation of it being a game at least on par with its predecessor is absolutely NOT "expecting too much", but the very minimum to expect from a sequel, unless you consider it logical to buy something worse than what you already had.

If the goal of the developpers was to make a dumber game, they may have succeeded at it, but that's not exactly something I'd put on their credit.

 

[bonafide11]

It's extremely tiring to see constantly the same misconceptions/lie being sprouted by the blind fans, despite being each time countered.

I'm not even a blind fan, I was disappointed with it too. There were things I definitely did not like about it. But I'm not as irrational as most people here. I realize it takes time to develop a game, we can't expect it to be on the same level as the final expansion pack of Civ IV yet. And people DID complain about Civ IV for being "dumbed down" too. There were a lot of people very pissed about it. The same thing happened when both Warlords and Beyond the Sword, people whined and complained and threw temper tantrums about them because they didn't meet their expectations. Then a few months later, once patches are released, people generally cool down and learn to enjoy the game, even if it is different than what they expected.

Maybe it's because I have a life outside of games, but I just think you all look childish whining and throwing temper tantrums because a game didn't meet your expectations. You might want to try going out sometime?
Moderator Action: Trolling is not allowed here.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Ok, first you said "not badly optimized" does not refer to the AI, it just refers to the "engine".
Now the user interface (better: the information provided by it) is not important in the context of "not badly optimized", either.

Do you mind explaining what "not badly optimized" then would mean? To me, it seems not much is being left.

It seems you're not too familiar with the concept of code optimisation, which is what most of us are talking about when we talk about good or bad optimisation. (The page I linked is written by people who can explain this sort of thing much better than I can)

Not showing various information to the player can be described as both a UI and a design problem. It would be very unusual to describe lack of info on the interface as an optimisation problem. In any case it's certainly not a code or algorithm optimisation problem.

AI is something that can be optimised or not, but I originally did not comment on the AI optimisation. You seem to be mixing up my quotes. So when you said this:

Ok, first you said "not badly optimized" does not refer to the AI, it just refers to the "engine".

let me remind you that the following is what I originally said:

From what I can tell, the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised.

You then took that quote and talked about workers as if it was a counter point. If I had claimed that AI code was not badly optimised, then that response from you would have been appropriate.


Yes, the AI is perhaps not very well optimised as demonstrated by extremely slow worker AI code. It's not completely clear yet whether this is just due to poor optimisation or increased complexity, but I've a feeling it's pretty likely that poorly designed algorithms play a big part in it.


EDIT
By the way, there is at least one UI issue which could be described as an optimisation issue - the 'move' command being slower than the player's inputs.

 

[lschnarch]

I understand that you would like to defend the game to the best of your abilities.

It seems you're not too familiar with the concept of code optimisation, which is what most of us are talking about when we talk about good or bad optimisation. (The page I linked is written by people who can explain this sort of thing much better than I can)

Personally, I think you've been completely lost. "Code optimization" seems to have been some "cool" term for you to throw into the discussion. Unfortunately, it has been picked up and now you are looking for a way out of the discussion.

Thanks anyway for that link.
"Unfortunately", you have forgotten to point out to which of the respective items you're referring.
Because we find in this article things like levels of optimization

• Design level
• Source code level
• Assembly level
• Compile level
• Run time

next to other explanations about

• Different algorithms
• Trade-offs
• Bottlenecks
• When to optimize
• Macros
• Automated and manual optimization
• Time taken for optimization

it would have been helpful to point out which of these items you see as referring to "not badly optimized".

Up to now I can only see you avoiding one point after the other saying "Yeah, but that is not what I meant".
So, once again, *what* did you mean?

Not showing various information to the player can be described as both a UI and a design problem. It would be very unusual to describe lack of info on the interface as an optimisation problem. In any case it's certainly not a code or algorithm optimisation problem.

The discussion was not about what is shown or not, but about the fact that Civ4's engine runs quicker although more information are displayed.

AI is something that can be optimised or not, but I originally did not comment on the AI optimisation. You seem to be mixing up my quotes. So when you said this:

Originally Posted by lschnarch
Ok, first you said "not badly optimized" does not refer to the AI, it just refers to the "engine".

let me remind you that the following is what I originally said:

Originally Posted by me
From what I can tell, the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised.

You then took that quote and talked about workers as if it was a counter point. If I had claimed that AI code was not badly optimised, then that response from you would have been appropriate.

To refresh your memory, you've said:

Well, yeah, it is a bit of speculation. From what I can tell, the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised. I haven't exactly done exhaustive tests or anything, but I get the impression that huge maps become horrendously slow mainly because of the number of AI players (including city states as they are players) and the number of units they have. Workers of course being the culprit of some of the biggest parts of the slowdown (fixed partly in latest patch as far as I know).

So, you clearly have put workers as part of the units of the different AI players into the context in which you mentioned that " the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised".

After I have picked that up, you avoided it by saying that workers according to your opinion do not belong into the field of "optimization".

When I say workers are a big culprit, I imply the AI for dealing with those workers. This is a different beast to the game's engine or its graphics. At least, that is how I understand it...

Acknowledging that I might have misunderstood you, I brought the example of the graphics:

Originally Posted by lschnarch View Post
Well, I may have misunderstood you, but while I was thinking about it, it came to my mind that one of the differences I experience between Civ5 and Civ4 is that in Civ4 I zoomed out as much as possible to have the best overview about the map.
In Civ5 I zoom *in* much more because otherwise scrolling around becomes very slow and staggered (i7 920, GTX 280, 8 GB RAM for both cases).
Which means, even the graphics system seems to be much slower for Civ5 (especially taking into consideration that it utilizes *2* of my 4 cores, while Civ4 only utilizes *1* core; in both cases the utilization of the respective core is around 50 - 60 %).

Actually I have every reason to think that the optimization of Civ5 is *very, very* bad, both in terms of graphics and AI performance.

which you countered by the statement that Civ4's graphics were much less demanding.

Civ4 was graphically a much less demanding game - there's no doubt about that. But I'm not so sure that it was necessarily any better optimised than what civ5 is in that regard.

In other words, just remember that if a system is performing half as much in half the time, that doesn't make it more optimised.

When I mentioned that nevertheless Civ4 provided much more information information-wise, you answered:

No, you're talking about UI issues now. I may agree with some or most of complaints about the UI, but they are separate from the discussion of graphics, engine or AI optimisation.

When I finally asked about *what* you would mean by "not badly optimized", you came back with this link about code optimization.

To be honest, in the whole context of this "discussion" you have not given the slightest hint about what part of optimization you're talking.
All what you've done so far is to say "Well, I didn't mean *this*".

So, once again:
*What* in Civ5 is not badly optimized according to your opinion?

 

[PieceOfMind]

I understand that you would like to defend the game to the best of your abilities.

That is not what I am doing here. I am only trying to the best of my ability to describe where the faults are with civ5. As I have said, I believe the problems lie more within the AI coding than they do in the engine or the graphics.

Personally, I think you've been completely lost. "Code optimization" seems to have been some "cool" term for you to throw into the discussion. Unfortunately, it has been picked up and now you are looking for a way out of the discussion.

No, this is just the meaning of optimisation that is usually spoken about by programmers (including modders), computer scientists, engineers etc. This is not just some 'cool' term.

The definition at the top of the page is a decent enough one:
In computer science, program optimization or software optimization is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources.

In the context of the coding for civ5, you could say that optimising would mean re writing code so that it performs the same job faster (in shorter time) and/or using less memory. It could also include writing the code to make more effective use of multiple cpu cores. For graphics optimisation, it would be rewriting code so that there is less load on the GPU and/or CPU.

Thanks anyway for that link.
"Unfortunately", you have forgotten to point out to which of the respective items you're referring.
Because we find in this article things like levels of optimization

• Design level
• Source code level
• Assembly level
• Compile level
• Run time

next to other explanations about

• Different algorithms
• Trade-offs
• Bottlenecks
• When to optimize
• Macros
• Automated and manual optimization
• Time taken for optimization

it would have been helpful to point out which of these items you see as referring to "not badly optimized".

Mainly the definition at the start is the most useful. That's all you need to read. The rest is just detail in case it's a topic you're really interested in. If you have no background in computer science at all, it may be of limited use - I'm not sure.

Up to now I can only see you avoiding one point after the other saying "Yeah, but that is not what I meant".
So, once again, *what* did you mean?

I've already repeated myself. But let me dot point it this time:

In my opinion:

• Game engine (including graphics) is not that badly optimised.
• AI coding may or may not be optimised. Very slow turn times when large number of players/units suggests AI coding is poorly written or poorly optimised. However increased complexity of AI necessary for dealing with 1UPT and Zone of Control issues could contribute to the longer turn times. Because we can't see the core sdk (the code) yet, it's hard to say for sure.
• Issues with gameplay/UI like whether you tell at a glance from the main map whether a tile is being worked are not issues of optimisation but rather issues of design.
• The fact that some movement inputs are rejected by the game can be said to be caused by an optimisation problem if the input is rejected because the algorithm computing whether the path is legal or not is inefficient or too slow.

The discussion was not about what is shown or not, but about the fact that Civ4's engine runs quicker although more information are displayed.

There's a bit of a difference in meaning between showing information and showing graphics. Civ4's interface may show more information from the main screen, but just showing information (e.g. text) isn't a very proecessor-intensive task. However, rendering twice or ten times as many polygons would be more demanding on the graphics engine.

For the purposes of discussing optimisation, how much info is displayed on the UI isn't really relevant.

To refresh your memory, you've said:

So, you clearly have put workers as part of the units of the different AI players into the context in which you mentioned that " the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised".

No this is just the way you've incorrectly interpreted my statements. Let me rephrase that paragraph so I'm a bit clearer:
Instead of this:

From what I can tell, the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised. I haven't exactly done exhaustive tests or anything, but I get the impression that huge maps become horrendously slow mainly because of the number of AI players (including city states as they are players) and the number of units they have. Workers of course being the culprit of some of the biggest parts of the slowdown (fixed partly in latest patch as far as I know).

Read it as this:

From what I can tell, the graphics or underlying engine aren't that poorly optimised. Instead, I believe the main cause of the late-game slowdown is poorly written AI code. For example, the AI code for managing workers appears to be extremely slow.

Hopefully my view will be clearer to you now.

After I have picked that up, you avoided it by saying that workers according to your opinion do not belong into the field of "optimization".

No you are misquoting me again!

I never said that workers don't belong to the field of optimisation. You can't quote me saying that because I never did.

What I said is that worker optimisation does not fall under engine or graphics optimisation. It falls instead under AI optimisation. Please stop misquoting me on this.

Acknowledging that I might have misunderstood you, I brought the example of the graphics:

which you countered by the statement that Civ4's graphics were much less demanding.

When I mentioned that nevertheless Civ4 provided much more information information-wise, you answered:


When I finally asked about *what* you would mean by "not badly optimized", you came back with this link about code optimization.

To be honest, in the whole context of this "discussion" you have not given the slightest hint about what part of optimization you're talking.
All what you've done so far is to say "Well, I didn't mean *this*".

So, once again:
*What* in Civ5 is not badly optimized according to your opinion?

Repeating myself:
Game engine / graphics don't appear to be badly optimised.
AI coding appears to be badly optimised.

 

[Mousey_Commander]

I'm not even a blind fan, I was disappointed with it too. There were things I definitely did not like about it. But I'm not as irrational as most people here. I realize it takes time to develop a game, we can't expect it to be on the same level as the final expansion pack of Civ IV yet. And people DID complain about Civ IV for being "dumbed down" too. There were a lot of people very pissed about it. The same thing happened when both Warlords and Beyond the Sword, people whined and complained and threw temper tantrums about them because they didn't meet their expectations. Then a few months later, once patches are released, people generally cool down and learn to enjoy the game, even if it is different than what they expected.

Maybe it's because I have a life outside of games, but I just think you all look childish whining and throwing temper tantrums because a game didn't meet your expectations. You might want to try going out sometime?

You seem to be assuming to much about the lifestyle of other members here, also aside from the first few days of release, most people in the threads I have seen have managed to provide fairly constructive critiscism, usually keeping fairly open minded about others opinions.

You however just have just resorted to insulting them saying they look like children throwing temper tantrums.

 

[Babri]

Sorry ! But Firaxis is not EA. Don't expect them to release a new Civilization game every year.
Civ is already a good game. Just need some polishing work to make it superb.
ciV + patches + xpansions = SUPERB.

 

[Drakarska]

Sorry ! But Firaxis is not EA. Don't expect them to release a new Civilization game every year.
Civ is already a good game. Just need some polishing work to make it superb.
ciV + patches + xpansions = SUPERB.

And how much more are we supposed to shell out for this "Superb Polish"? What? Another two expansions similar to Civ IV? Which I believe the mod community helped fix the errors ( I could be wrong, been awhile).

The point being is that BTS brought as close to a perfect Civ as possible ( at least IMO). Now we're just supposed to toss our expectations away and blindly accept this dev's "Grand New Vision?"

 

[blind biker]

Civ IV vanilla was/is an excellent game, once the bugs were patched. I should know - I am playing Civ IV vanilla most days of the week, and I find it much less repetitive and much more challenging and immersive than Civ V. With Civ V it's just drudgery, physical work, brain falls asleep... Civ IV, on the other hand, gives you a bit of options, a bit of fantasy, challenges, choices, upturns, facets. It's just betta'!

 

[AriochIV]

For all its problems, I think Civ V has the potential to be a great foundation for expansion packs.

But for those of you who think Civ V is a total failure and want to move to Civ VI, I don't get why you think the same folks who screwed up Civ V will somehow be able to get Civ VI right.

 

[bonafide11]

You seem to be assuming to much about the lifestyle of other members here, also aside from the first few days of release, most people in the threads I have seen have managed to provide fairly constructive critiscism, usually keeping fairly open minded about others opinions.

You however just have just resorted to insulting them saying they look like children throwing temper tantrums.

You speak of "constructive criticism" in a thread about if Civ should skip any expansion packs for Civ V and move right on to Civ VI. Yeah, that's real constructive criticism, and not whiny at all. The game just came out a month or two ago and some people are already telling Firaxis just to give up on it? It has faults, sure, but it's not that bad. It'll get better. It has a solid foundation, it just needs to be refined and improved upon.

 

[Babri]

The point being is that BTS brought as close to a perfect Civ as possible ( at least IMO). Now we're just supposed to toss our expectations away and blindly accept this dev's "Grand New Vision?"

cIV had its own problems. When cIV came out, people were shouting that it sucks, very buggy etc. With the passage of time the problems were fixed with patches & expansions & eventually it became the a very solid game. Maybe you just have a habit of forgetting the past ?

 

[lschnarch]

cIV had its own problems. When cIV came out, people were shouting that it sucks, very buggy etc. With the passage of time the problems were fixed with patches & expansions & eventually it became the a very solid game. Maybe you just have a habit of forgetting the past ?

Civ4 mainly had technical and balancing problems.

Civ5 has design-based problems.

 

[Peregrine]

With all its problems, I DON'T think V is a good foundation. At all.

Hopefully, the designers will move on and be replaced by someone else. Hopefully, someone else who will IMPROVE rather than retrogress the core civ elements. As was done w/IV. It CAN be done. The question is; will it? I consider III a failure, and it was followed by IV, so, once again, it CAN be done.

"Opinions differ"

The game just came out just a month ago, and I AM just suggesting that firaxis give up on it. It has faults, they ARE "that bad," it WON'T "get better," it does NOT have a solid foundation, and refinement and "improvements" can't fix a game that is fundamentally flawed in a plethora of ways. It should have been "improved" prior to release. That it wasn't is the primary and generalized complaint of most critics on this forum.

Once again, I find this behavior strange. I don't care if someone likes the game. More power to ya. Enjoy it all you want. I have not the slightest problem with that. AND YET . . . if I am critical of the game, somehow we are labeled "whiners," accused of throwing tantrums, etc. WHAT DOES IT MATTER TO YOU IF WE ARE UNSATISFIED WITH THIS GAME AND POST OUR CRITICISMS HERE? WHY do the attack dogs feel the NEED to defend this game. GO. PLAY THE GAME. It's soooooo perfect, right? If it's so damn wonderful, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON HERE DEFENDING IT BY ATTACKING OTHER POSTERS!? "Oh, it clutters up the forum." Not in my opinion. Is it some unspoken REQUIREMENT that ALL threads, ALL posts be "positive" toward the game? If so, I missed that memo.

It almost seems as if a negative post/criticism somehow offends certain people . . . and thus the attack dogs. WHY should someone else's negative opinion affect YOU? Oddly enough, and apparently this has never occurred to the attack dogs, what most critics are trying to do is to send a message to potential designers of civ games, whether they be firaxis, or someone else who succeeds firaxis. Critics are pointing out the design flaws of the game in a vocal, explicit way SO THAT THE NEXT VERSION (hopefully) WON'T repeat the same mistakes. It is arguable, but that is exactly what occurred with III, and it's successor, IV. III was bad, garnered criticism, and IV followed, which was a significant improvement. There IS constructive purpose in our criticisms--a better civ game than V.

But, once again, if anyone is happy with V, GOOD. ENJOY. If, for whatever twisted reason someone CAN'T enjoy V because someone is complaining about it on CFC . . . then my advice is to seek professional help. Good luck.

 

[vandyr]

Because BTS took an additional two years to develop after the release of Civ IV! They didn't have that long to work on Civ V. Programming and testing games takes a lot of time. It's not something you can just whip together overnight and include all the features of a game that took years the previous time. Comparing the final expansion pack of a game to the initial release of a new game is ridiculous. Make the comparison once Civ V's final expansion pack is released. For now, you need to compare the games vanilla, as that's the only fair comparison.

Sometimes I wonder about people on this forum...

Quoted, because this needs to be plastered all over the place to get the point through some people's skulls. And Alps is entirely correct about the entitlement issue.

 

[Akka]

I'm not even a blind fan, I was disappointed with it too.

Don't use false arguments then.

There were things I definitely did not like about it. But I'm not as irrational as most people here. I realize it takes time to develop a game, we can't expect it to be on the same level as the final expansion pack of Civ IV yet.

I answered this false reasoning above.

And people DID complain about Civ IV for being "dumbed down" too. There were a lot of people very pissed about it. The same thing happened when both Warlords and Beyond the Sword, people whined and complained and threw temper tantrums about them because they didn't meet their expectations. Then a few months later, once patches are released, people generally cool down and learn to enjoy the game, even if it is different than what they expected.

It's true that there was lots of complaints about Civ4 being buggy (which is something I've already said), but it's plain FALSE to pretend there was noticeable complaints about Civ4 being dumbed down, especially as the only noticeable complaint about its design was that it was too complex to "jump into" - the total opposite of being "dumbed down"...

You're plainly either misremembering or lying.

You speak of "constructive criticism" in a thread about if Civ should skip any expansion packs for Civ V and move right on to Civ VI. Yeah, that's real constructive criticism, and not whiny at all. The game just came out a month or two ago and some people are already telling Firaxis just to give up on it? It has faults, sure, but it's not that bad. It'll get better. It has a solid foundation, it just needs to be refined and improved upon.

The constructive criticism has already been given. This thread is not "what don't you like about Civ5 ?" but "is it worth trying to fix it or should they just trash it and start from scratch ?".
As the core of the game is felt by many (myself included) to be utterly BADLY DESIGNED, they (and I) see it as a lost cause, which will never be really great (and I'll happily eat a crow if I'm proved wrong, but I'm convinced I won't be). The very CORE of the game is boring, because the very BASIC design direction and ideas were wrong. As such, trying to fix it will just be lots of efforts and money wasted, and it's better to just throw it out and start anew, without the bad core principles that led to this debacle.

And it's your opinion it's "not that bad" and that it has a "solid foundation". For many, it's the opposite, as explained in the previous paragraph : the problem is the VERY FOUNDATION of the game, which is so deeply flawed it dooms any attempt to salvage it.

You should perhaps try to see it on the other PoV : if two monthes after the game was out, it's already seen as a loss by many people... Is is a problem from their supposed lifestyle, or from the game ?

 

[Akka]

Quoted, because this needs to be plastered all over the place to get the point through some people's skulls. And Alps is entirely correct about the entitlement issue.

=>No, as said before, there is no reason why they would forgot things between Civ4 and Civ5.
When they developped Civ4, they didn't need ten years to improve on Civ3, even though it was the time from Civ1 to Civ3... Following your logic they should have, after all they're supposed to forget everything and start from scratch each time !

cIV had its own problems. When cIV came out, people were shouting that it sucks, very buggy etc. With the passage of time the problems were fixed with patches & expansions & eventually it became the a very solid game. Maybe you just have a habit of forgetting the past ?

=> No.
People complained about the bugs and memory leaks of Civ4 when it came out, but they generally praised the gameplay, design and ideas.
This is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from Civ5, which is panned about BOTH the bugs and the design.
It's extremely tiring to see constantly the same misconceptions/lie being sprouted by the blind fans, despite being each time countered.

Do you people even READ ?

Let me quote myself :

It's extremely tiring to see constantly the same misconceptions/lie being sprouted by the blind fans, despite being each time countered.

Thanks for proving it, but no thanks for making it necessary to repeat it YET AGAIN.
If the Civ5 forums have such a low amount of constructive discussions, I know why, and it's not because of the "haters", but because of the ability of some people to simply IGNORE everything that prove them wrong.