Mr.Carbohydrate
Chieftain
Why?
Civ IV BTS was the latest game they released so they should have learnt everything from it. There is no reason to step backwards.
should they skip Civ 5 Xpacs and go straight to Civ 6?
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Why?
Civ IV BTS was the latest game they released so they should have learnt everything from it. There is no reason to step backwards.
+1. Agreed completely.
here we go, so as a consumer and supporter of Firaxis since Civ 1 I have no right of reply? I should just say nothing and swallow whatever comes? I don't actually understand your thinking. I can't conceive why you would want to give up your right to say that you thought a product lacked the qualities you were expecting from the new instalment.
If you want to talk about Blizzard, they say loud and clearly their motto is "build a better product and people will want to buy it", not some hackneyed measure of tell em to shut up and replace your customer base with new customers. If you actually knew dot one about commerce or marketing you would know that the golden rule is the 20-1 rule, or it takes 20 times as much effort to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. you want to bleet about circling the drain, what you are advocating is sheer lunacy. If Firaxis is hoping to pick up new customers in a now very competitive market at the expense of their long suffering fan base then I would be selling shares in them faster then shares in snowball inc in Antarctica.
Peregrine
The Swift
Agree with Ischy's post back on page 2.
Didn't purchase the thing and won't, so . . . on to Civ6, and hopefully it'll be an improvement. III was a no-go for moi as well. It's funny how the even numbered versions are the best.
Don't see how it can be worse than V. At least with an abject failure, there is nowhere to go but up.
Didn't purchase the thing and won't, so . . . on to Civ6, and hopefully it'll be an improvement. III was a no-go for moi as well. It's funny how the even numbered versions are the best.
Don't see how it can be worse than V. At least with an abject failure, there is nowhere to go but up.
heliostellar
Chieftain
Civ V is an unmitigated disaster and no expansion is going to fix that. They should just stop making Civ games until the developer pool at Firaxis cycles out. Clearly this game was based on Civ:Rev which was engineered by a new generation of developers. I don't think we're going to see this series return to its core competencies until a different group of people start working on it.
I do have quite some experience with professional programmers.
And often I hear: "Well, *what* did you expect?"
The question is quite simple: I did expect what was said by the programmers (in terms of Civ5: what was said by the lead designer and the producer) to be delivered.
In case of Civ5, I did expect a working, competitive AI, especially in the area of 1upt-based combat. This was not delivered.
I did expect a meaninful, understandable way of diplomacy, since this is the whole point behind the fully animated leaders. This was not delivered.
I did expect a game engine utilizing modern processors and OS in a meaningful way. This was not delivered.
I did expect an UI which would allow me for easily accessing information, making it possible to pick the right options at the right moment with the least effort from my side. This was not delivered.
Bottom line: the main advertised features (pre-release) turn out to be flawed and/or not working according to the current standards of technology and software design.
This game is sub-par in almost each and every aspect and the fact that we don't like this sad truth doesn't change anything.
Gismo
Chieftain
I'm sorry, but I beg to differ with your second sentence. The fault is in the designer not aiming for the fans of previous Civ-titles.
But I agree that it is not the fault of the software engineers.
Minmaster
Prince
they need to FIX the game via patches for the vanilla instead of going the expansion route and charging people for even more money to get the game right.
i really hate when we have to rely on expansions to get a game that isn't broken. if everything is addressed, then consider doing expansions, but not before.
The single biggest thing I'm waiting for is the gamecore sdk tools. Once we have the AI code, finally, we'll be able to figure out what the heck is making the turns take so long. That is unless they make some drastic efficiency improvements in the patches before we get the sdk.
On the whole, modders have done a very good job improving the efficiency of civ4 bts (e.g. see this mod: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9843396). It's a bit embarrassing actually, for Firaxis, that modders can do that to their game. I imagine a similar thing will be possible with civ5.
As stated in that thread, the main people credited with these improvements are StMartin, Kael, Afforess and Sephi.
On the whole, modders have done a very good job improving the efficiency of civ4 bts (e.g. see this mod: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9843396). It's a bit embarrassing actually, for Firaxis, that modders can do that to their game. I imagine a similar thing will be possible with civ5.
As stated in that thread, the main people credited with these improvements are StMartin, Kael, Afforess and Sephi.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I always assumed that Firaxis is running on a shoestring, and can't really afford to higher many programmers. Not enough to optimize the code when they're still fixing bugs, anyway.
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).
All the ways to deal with 1UPT is the other area where lack of optimization will really hurt. Pathing in a system where friendly units can actually block their own is much more difficult to program for, and zone of control just makes things even worse. In my view, these sorts of rules are probably best left to games that don't need AI at all (i.e. human to human games). My pragmatic expectation of the tactical AI for civ5 before it was released was that it would be worse than civ4's. It seems that skepticism of the hype was warranted.
All the ways to deal with 1UPT is the other area where lack of optimization will really hurt. Pathing in a system where friendly units can actually block their own is much more difficult to program for, and zone of control just makes things even worse. In my view, these sorts of rules are probably best left to games that don't need AI at all (i.e. human to human games). My pragmatic expectation of the tactical AI for civ5 before it was released was that it would be worse than civ4's. It seems that skepticism of the hype was warranted.
And this you don't call "poorly optimized"?
From what I observe in my games the AI moves units around just to move them around.
I have seen cases in which the AI had 5 workers changing improvements within the range of just *one* city. Which typically doesn't make any sense, as growth of the city would only lead to the necessity of changing just one hex at the time.
Anything else means that the setup of the city was wrong before.
It seems that the engine still browses through all units to check what it could do with this unit.
More efficient would be to check what has to be done and then looking for the single one unit which can do this in the shortest time.
Edit: and by the way, what kind of interaction does a City State have with other players? Except for being attacked I don't see anything which would require deep calculations. The City State is just reacting to other players actions as delivering its goods when being bribed or a mission being fulfilled.
In what terms this would cause massive calculations is far beyond me.
lschnarch you misunderstand me, and it's obvious because of what you bolded in my quote.
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...
To put it simply, I was pretty sure that AI coding is not what would usually be called part of the engine. You can have a really really efficient engine, but the game will still run poorly if the AI is chewing through tonnes of processing power for not much good.
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...
To put it simply, I was pretty sure that AI coding is not what would usually be called part of the engine. You can have a really really efficient engine, but the game will still run poorly if the AI is chewing through tonnes of processing power for not much good.
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
Actually I have every reason to think that the optimization of Civ5 is *very, very* bad, both in terms of graphics and AI performance.
MadRat
Cheese Raider
Another option should be : Fix Civ5
Looks like this thread once again proves the validity of GIFT.
Rat
Looks like this thread once again proves the validity of GIFT.
Rat
bonafide11
Worker
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...
In civ4 if you zoomed out as far as possible, it turned into a different mode where different graphics were drawn (simpler graphics). Technically I think civ4 actually had a more limited ability to zoom out in that sense. (You couldn't zoom out very far before hitting globe view).
The bottlenecks when moving around the map in civ5 at a very zoomed out level appear more to be about memory management, because after revealing an area it's considerably smoother the next time you pass over it. 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.
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.
In Civ4 I got the information needed at first glance.
It was very obvoius which tiles were being worked at and which not. It was even possible to identify different units in an easy way, something for which now you need these icons floating over the units.
I would say that Civ4 was performing double as much as Civ5 is, information-wise.
If nevertheless Civ5 eats up more computing power (and it does, actually, as a look to the CPU utilization and GPU temperature reveals) *AND* delivering less information about what is going on in the game, then something is badly optimized.
And that is what we've been talking about.
Sometimes I wonder about people on this forum...
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?
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.
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