Sid Meier's GDC2010 talk, obviously the Civ5 devs didnt listen.. Why?

[neilkaz]

Agreed that it was also rushed for Xmas, but I'd have thought that releasing it by early November would have been good enough for Xmas sales. However, by releasing it in Sept and patching it twice, they get the benefits of us all beta testing it for them before parents buy the game for their kids etc etc.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[blind biker]

Part 3 has som incredibly fun examples of the playtesters they had for Civ Revolutions...
Such as expecting to win 100% of the time in 3 to 1 odds battles.

This is golden.

I saw Civ Revolutions, and thought to myself "Just how dumb do you have to be to like this drek?" I guess now I know.

 

[zub]

What did he say here that isn't respected in Civ5?
Notably less RNG, AI remaining cocky when down to one city.

 

[P-Zombie]

Agreed that it was also rushed for Xmas, but I'd have thought that releasing it by early November would have been good enough for Xmas sales. However, by releasing it in Sept and patching it twice, they get the benefits of us all beta testing it for them before parents buy the game for their kids etc etc.

.. neilkaz ..

But if your primary concern is selling boxes (or downloads), and you're not confident of your product, wouldn't it make more sense to wait? As long as you release before Black Friday, you're not too late for the holiday rush. And with a late release, there's little if any window left for people to discover your game isn't really done yet, so your sales won't be hurt much if at all by bad press.

An earlier release makes more sense if you think buzz about the game will attract customers who might have passed on it otherwise. Or, alternately, an earlier release makes sense if you think other titles are going to overshadow yours, and bury it with hype and shelf space priority.

Whatever was going on there, it sure seems like a bad decision now. Does anyone know how CiV's sales have been trending?

 

[pazmacats]

It's like listening to Lars Ulrich talking about thrash metal after metallica released the album metallica.

Sid does not make strategy games anymore. He makes casual games for casual gamers. He knows far more about marketing than game design.

 

[P-Zombie]

What did he say here that isn't respected in Civ5?
Notably less RNG, AI remaining cocky when down to one city.

I think the biggest thing missing is the foreshadowing, the "this is good, and it's going to keep getting better". The mathematical bonuses from buildings and techs are mostly very small, easy to ignore. You get the basic tools needed to win the game very early, and most of what you get later is either 'more of same', or not worth building.

Also, with less of everything due to streamlining and simplifying, there are (to me anyway) a lot fewer "interesting decisions" to be made. For instance, there are too few choices for improvements. No cottages, no workshops, no windmills, no watermills.

What good is it being king, when there are so few choices to make?

 

[Zechnophobe]

I have a hypothesis on why people think a 75% victory chance is unlosable. It is because people are just not internalizing it as a 'win percentage' but simply as a stat. On the scale of 1 to 100, 75 is very VERY high. And if you are simply looking at it in that rather naive way, it appears to be an overwhelming chance.

Imagine if they showed a little bar graph, split in two. The left side is Red, the right side is Green. The Percentage of the bar that is green is your chance to win. When combat goes, a random spot is chosen on the bar. There is no % number there, but the math effect is the same. Further more Because you can see the red, and can see your little marker in it, it is easier to internalize likeliehood of loss.

 

[lschnarch]

I have a hypothesis on why people think a 75% victory chance is unlosable. It is because people are just not internalizing it as a 'win percentage' but simply as a stat.

Actually, "people" are rigth with their assumption, and Sid proves to have not understood the mechanics of his own series.

Another simple example.
You have party A having 2.000 riflemen and party B having 1.000 riflemen.
Each individual rifleman has a chance of 50% hitting his target.

Which in reality would mean that with the first volley, party B would have lost ALL of their riflemen, thus losing the battle.
In Civ4, the calculation is different:
A/(A+B) = 2.000/3.000 = 0,66666 (for the first volley).
So, with a chance of mere 66%, party A will have a hit, reducing party B's health by 5 or 6 of 20 points, leaving them with at least 14 health points.
And so on.

The result is, in Civ4 party B has really a decent chance not only to survive, but actually to win the battle.

This is just completey unrealistic and not plausible. In realitiy, the 2.000 riflemen *WILL* win the battle. It may be that they have to take more then the expected 500 losses, but finally they *WILL* win.
In Civ4, they have good chances to lose.

The way in which combats were resolved in Civ4 was just a mess, and Mr. Meier defending this way just proves that he has not much understanding of what his games are doing.
Actually, they have been based on distorted combat calculations since long.

tl;dr: Yes, Sid Meier has created Civ1. Yes, his name has been attached to any Civ game since then.
No, he doesn't understand the genre nor does he understand the way "his" games are working anymore.

I wouldn't put too much hope into Sid Meier anymore. Even less, since he is promoting Civ Facebook so much.

 

[elthrasher]

Another simple example.
You have party A having 2.000 riflemen and party B having 1.000 riflemen.
Each individual rifleman has a chance of 50% hitting his target.

You've made this same argument twice now, but it isn't a good analogy at all. 3-1 odds doesn't mean it's three guys on one guy. It means that the game has calculated that one side has a 75% chance of winning and the other has a 25% chance of winning. That's all. Not accepting that you have a 25% chance of losing when the game tells you you have a 25% chance of losing is...uh...kinda weird.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

so IMHO. it is not that the programmers and artists don't want to create a great Civ game in Sids world, they just have lost alot of control over the dev cycle with being nothing more than a design house for 2K.

Yep, that pretty much reflects what i too believe happened to the whole end-results we all have to cope with **UNTIL** chronological patches try to address some if not all remaining issues anyone may still have.

 

[lschnarch]

You've made this same argument twice now, but it isn't a good analogy at all. 3-1 odds doesn't mean it's three guys on one guy. It means that the game has calculated that one side has a 75% chance of winning and the other has a 25% chance of winning. That's all. Not accepting that you have a 25% chance of losing when the game tells you you have a 25% chance of losing is...uh...kinda weird.

I agree to this to a certain extend.

Yet, we have to take into consideration what the unexperienced first-time player will be thinking.
Of course, after having played Civ4 long enough you knew that sooner or later you would even lose the infamous 99.x% fights.

Yet, I assume that most of the first-time players automatically transfer the ratios to numbers of men and as I have admitted, I think they are right in doing so. To do so is much more plausible than accepting different strengths for units which you would assume to be almost equal in their combat values.
The axeman having a strength of 7.5 against the swordsman with strenght 6 is an artificial setting of the game and thus hard to cover for the first-time player.
After all, what has been more common, the sword or the axe? Maybe the axe as it was a tool and not a specialized weapon. But what was dominating the battefields? The sword, after all what we know.

The resulting 55,56% chance (for the first round of fighting) to win doesn't seem to be logical for the inexperienced player. Why should an axe-wielding fighter be stronger than one with a sword?

You really have to forget about the unit type to be able to understand Civ4's combat system. Which is a weakness, since it kills immersion.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Does anyone know how CiV's sales have been trending?

Here's what gamrReview statistics reveal.

 

[evrett37]

Dont forget to blame yourselves and your fellow forum members. Many people here tested the game before release and said NOTHING..I was trying to organize protest s prior to release and didnt get a toot of interest. If the so called "fanatics" are going to sit around all passive and pick their nose while 2k is feeding them crap do we really deserve a good game ?

Before we as a community are once again worthy of being graced with good games we are going to have to start actively caring and being involved during the development cycle.

Moderator Action: We don't like this trolling attempt against the community and certain members of it.

Additional note: Everyone who quotes trolling after it has been infracted will also get infracted for trolling, because backtrolling is trolling, too.

 

[LordTC]

You've made this same argument twice now, but it isn't a good analogy at all. 3-1 odds doesn't mean it's three guys on one guy. It means that the game has calculated that one side has a 75% chance of winning and the other has a 25% chance of winning. That's all. Not accepting that you have a 25% chance of losing when the game tells you you have a 25% chance of losing is...uh...kinda weird.

I think the argument is that the game starts getting the odds completely wrong once you get to small percentage situations. In certain versions of Civ Spearman vs Tank was in the area of the Tank being 90% (18 vs 2?) and there was endless frustration (and icons and user sigs and whatever) on spearmen beating tank. If you aren't updating the spearmen to have shovels and destroy my tanks by digging traps and what not, it destroys the game immersion when the spears win. One could make the argument that the game needs to either have some immersive experience connected to winning/losing epic battles, or needs to eliminate lobsided results. For example, if spearmen beat a tank and I get a pop-up window with a graphic (possibly a movie), a story of a legendary battle involving the units (including an explanation for how they won, and a permenant marker on the map (option to hide them) indicating the battle site, then I'd still be immersed, even if frustrated. Stuff like that happens.

But when it just happens on the map, no explanation other than the initial display of the odds.. no indication of the actual combat roll, no battle results screen, just the unit dying, it feels hollow and unfair. I get the odds the game gives me, and in lots of cases I agree with them, but losing a battle you're over 90% to win doesn't feel right.

Also I think people internalize large numbers differently in part because it usually means an era difference. 20 to 10 is often a modern era unit vs a medieval unit, and we all expect the modern era unit to win on a rational level so much so that we can only suspend disbelief about what the odds tell us when we actually win. Pikes vs tanks and what not. If pikes end up beating my tanks then no matter what the odds are supposed to be according to the game, it feels wrong and the game experience is shattered, even more so when I expect it to happen somewhat often. I mean spearmen vs tank was even more common because it could be a fortified veteran spearmen in a city with a defense upgrade vs a tank, and sometimes you'd lose 2 in a row there.. and that would drive you nuts. What's really going on is that you feel the game is WRONG because city walls shouldn't give a bonus vs tanks, and that fortification shouldn't really help much, and this unit that shouldn't get close enough to attack is destroying 2 whole divisions of tanks, and its hard to not think about that when the game tells you you're only 85% to win, even more so when that other 15% happens once or twice in a row.

 

[alpaca]

It's quite interesting that even pretty mathematically-minded people who know full well what a 75% victory chance means often get frustrated when they lose a couple of 75% battles in civ4 in a row. Sid Meier calls this paranoia but I'd just say that the human mind is bad at really understanding numbers intuitively.

I believe we think in categories rather than actual chances of winning: If the chance is above a certain threshold, you decide you should always attack and interpret this as meaning you should always win, subconsciously. Although the low-number example is a bit strange for me because most people I've watched (including myself maybe 8) would say "whew, I was lucky there, I shouldn't have won that but I'm glad I did" rather than "no, it's ok, I had all that strategy and stuff"

The introduction of multiple visible combat rounds to minimize luck is a very good thing in my opinion. You can still have a fight that goes bad but then you at least often have the chance to retreat or back it up with a second unit. Also, you'll notice that Civ5 displays the expected result as a health bar after the battle as well as a number. This makes the events where you get lucky much more obvious than in Civ4 in my opinion.

 

[P-Zombie]

...we can only suspend disbelief about what the odds tell us when we actually win.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

This goes back to the original topic, too...Sid's discussion points and how CiV measures up. I think CiV did a decent job with combat odds, since a surprise loss doesn't necessarily mean a lost unit. It's much easier to accept something like that when the stakes aren't all-or-nothing.

 

[blind biker]

It's quite interesting that even pretty mathematically-minded people who know full well what a 75% victory chance means often get frustrated when they lose a couple of 75% battles in civ4 in a row. Sid Meier calls this paranoia but I'd just say that the human mind is bad at really understanding numbers intuitively.

I believe we think in categories rather than actual chances of winning: If the chance is above a certain threshold, you decide you should always attack and interpret this as meaning you should always win, subconsciously. Although the low-number example is a bit strange for me because most people I've watched (including myself maybe 8) would say "whew, I was lucky there, I shouldn't have won that but I'm glad I did" rather than "no, it's ok, I had all that strategy and stuff"

The introduction of multiple visible combat rounds to minimize luck is a very good thing in my opinion. You can still have a fight that goes bad but then you at least often have the chance to retreat or back it up with a second unit. Also, you'll notice that Civ5 displays the expected result as a health bar after the battle as well as a number. This makes the events where you get lucky much more obvious than in Civ4 in my opinion.

If my chances are better than 50%, I attack. In the worst case, I just reload

 

[Jolly Rogerer]

Most historical battles numbers were a small factor, countless people have written about this including Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. If you equalize leaders, terrain, supply, logistics, and allow for only the basic head-on confrontation (no tactical outmaneuvering) then things come down to numbers. The combat engine in Civ5 allows for some implicit outmaneuvering through the flanking bonuses and is interesting with the both survive possibility.

Numbers matter a lot, but they are only one of many factors. When all other factors are equalized the chances that a given side will prevail in combat is proportional to the number of troops squared on each side. (eg 4 against 3 = 16 chances to win vs 9 = the larger side wins 16 out of 25 times).

 

[LordTC]

Numbers matter a lot, but they are only one of many factors. When all other factors are equalized the chances that a given side will prevail in combat is proportional to the number of troops squared on each side. (eg 4 against 3 = 16 chances to win vs 9 = the larger side wins 16 out of 25 times).

Firstly, Name one battle where all other things were equal - it's kind of hard for the same general to lead opposing armies at the same time consisting of the same units, etc. If you can't, how did you reach the conclusion that there is an n^2 relationship? Even if all other things were equal doesn't what type of symmetric terrain you have effect the relative advantages ( if only 10 men can engage at a time then 100 vs 10 isn't going to be the same as in terrain where 100 men can surround the 10, even if for unknown army sizes the terrain is neutral (doesn't favor either side)). I think unit types matter a lot too, if I have a smaller army but I have spears screening archers and you have entirely spears, I think I'm going to be a significant favorite in many situations, even though I should be a dog in your model.

 

[UknowsI]

That the game should always have a happy ending where the player wins is one of the problems. If I knew how to, I would send Sid the letter complaining that we are winning too much, but I think he has already gotten quite a few of those after CiV was released. I think these "great revelations" of Sid are some of the things which has taken the game a step backwards.

However, I am still one of those people who liked Civ 5 a lot and think it was a big improvement.