So anyway, place your bets: when will civ7 arrive?

[Krajzen]

It’s a turn based boardgame; like what could possibly be soaking up all that computing power?

1UPT system forcing every AI on the map to horribly struggle where and how to move each of its dozens of military units, and why, and how to coordinate it with other units and them shuffling positions, and simultaneously doing this both on the tactical layer for every unit and thinking in wider startegic context for every unit. And this happening every turn. For every AI civ and city state. Large map mid - to - late game, 12 civs and 18 city states, each civ has let's assume 25 military units on average, each city state has 7 military units, every time you click to load next turn, AI has to decide how to move each one of 400 tokens individually, in terrain context, tactical context and strategic context. Every turn, even during peace, AI has to decide for each of those units where to station them, move them, keep them asleep or not, explore, fight barbarians, upgrade, choose promotions (? I guess it's done randomly )...

In Humankind turn loading times are like 10 times lower for me than in civ6, on the same PC (which can handle witcher 3 on high settings 1900x1000 very fluently). And Humankind had significantly better combat AI on release than civ6 after years of patches.

I have like twenty other arguments for abandoning 1UPT, but if there is a rival 4X game with comparably big maps and everything, and one game has better combat AI and order of magnitude faster turn processing, so I don't waste literally hours of every game session (!) for AI processing its turns, just for it to be braindead moron, just that one reason alone makes me beg devs to try any other else army - combat system.

 

[aieeegrunt]

1UPT system forcing every AI on the map to horribly struggle where and how to move each of its dozens of military units, and why, and how to coordinate it with other units and them shuffling positions, and simultaneously doing this both on the tactical layer for every unit and thinking in wider startegic context for every unit. And this happening every turn. For every AI civ and city state. Large map mid - to - late game, 12 civs and 18 city states, each civ has let's assume 25 military units on average, each city state has 7 military units, every time you click to load next turn, AI has to decide how to move each one of 400 tokens individually, in terrain context, tactical context and strategic context. Every turn, even during peace, AI has to decide for each of those units where to station them, move them, keep them asleep or not, explore, fight barbarians, upgrade, choose promotions (? I guess it's done randomly )...

In Humankind turn loading times are like 10 times lower for me than in civ6, on the same PC (which can handle witcher 3 on high settings 1900x1000 very fluently). And Humankind had significantly better combat AI on release than civ6 after years of patches.

I have like twenty other arguments for abandoning 1UPT, but if there is a rival 4X game with comparably big maps and everything, and one game has better combat AI and order of magnitude faster turn processing, so I don't waste literally hours of every game session (!) for AI processing its turns, just for it to be braindead moron, just that one reason alone makes me beg devs to try any other else army - combat system.

BWA HA HA you are probably right, and it’s hilarious the extent to which 1UPT literally ruined everything

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

In Humankind turn loading times are like 10 times lower for me than in civ6, on the same PC

it is just lazy coding not taking advantage of the multiple CPUs and other technological advances to chip design. check out how fast the AI turns are for a "stardock" game. their AI is also actually competent.

it’s hilarious the extent to which 1UPT literally ruined everything

i disagree with all the hate this 1 UPT gets. i actually played since civ1 and it was abysmal to see all the units in 1 stack getting wiped by 1 nuke or getting bombarded to hell with various siege engines that also damages all the other units on the same stack.
I also agree that the AI is not very good at using range units or coordinate their attacks but that is a design choice of the devs. Check "old world" to see how efficient the AI is using 1 UPT there. Once it starts to attack a unit you know that unit will die. I would love to see the army idea of civ6 expanded to include a ranged unit and an infantry or cavalary unit to be attached . would make the armies stronger and create less units for the AI to coordinate.
Civ7 will definitely come before 2024 , the monetary incentive is way too much to ignore by the bean counters. considering that everything currently goes down i imagine they are scrambling to get it out as fast as possible and the state of the game be damned.

 

[aieeegrunt]

it is just lazy coding not taking advantage of the multiple CPUs and other technological advances to chip design. check out how fast the AI turns are for a "stardock" game. their AI is also actually competent.

i disagree with all the hate this 1 UPT gets. i actually played since civ1 and it was abysmal to see all the units in 1 stack getting wiped by 1 nuke or getting bombarded to hell with various siege engines that also damages all the other units on the same stack.
I also agree that the AI is not very good at using range units or coordinate their attacks but that is a design choice of the devs. Check "old world" to see how efficient the AI is using 1 UPT there. Once it starts to attack a unit you know that unit will die. I would love to see the army idea of civ6 expanded to include a ranged unit and an infantry or cavalary unit to be attached . would make the armies stronger and create less units for the AI to coordinate.
Civ7 will definitely come before 2024 , the monetary incentive is way too much to ignore by the bean counters. considering that everything currently goes down i imagine they are scrambling to get it out as fast as possible and the state of the game be damned.

A big stack being a big risk was perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Civ6 is basically a hexagon wargame. I played a lot of Avalon Hill/SPI type games back in the day, and the ones with hexes rapidly iterated to 2-4 unit stacking (sometimes adjusted for terrain) for very good reasons.

 

[Abaxial]

Civ6 is basically a hexagon wargame. I played a lot of Avalon Hill/SPI type games back in the day, and the ones with hexes rapidly iterated to 2-4 unit stacking (sometimes adjusted for terrain) for very good reasons.

Me too. But they had cardboard chits for units, and if you were playing a game with generous stacking rules, by Heaven it helped if you had good fingernails. Civ 6 is more like a miniatures wargame. If you have a spearman unit, there are four wee figures with spears and a cute combat animation where one of your lads picks up an enemy on the point of his spear and whaps him down on the ground. This is hard to do with a stack of four units, and Firaxis marketing division is not going to be happy losing the cute animations, so I'm afraid you have to live with no stacking.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Me too. But they had cardboard chits for units, and if you were playing a game with generous stacking rules, by Heaven it helped if you had good fingernails. Civ 6 is more like a miniatures wargame. If you have a spearman unit, there are four wee figures with spears and a cute combat animation where one of your lads picks up an enemy on the point of his spear and whaps him down on the ground. This is hard to do with a stack of four units, and Firaxis marketing division is not going to be happy losing the cute animations, so I'm afraid you have to live with no stacking.

People still play with animations on? It’s a major source of crashes

So you have a cute animation of someone marching out of the stack to pet their dog or whatever

 

[reddishrecue]

People still play with animations on? It’s a major source of crashes

So you have a cute animation of someone marching out of the stack to pet their dog or whatever

I play with animations on. I guess its kind of bad because you can hear the weapons the units are using.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Me too. But they had cardboard chits for units, and if you were playing a game with generous stacking rules, by Heaven it helped if you had good fingernails. Civ 6 is more like a miniatures wargame. If you have a spearman unit, there are four wee figures with spears and a cute combat animation where one of your lads picks up an enemy on the point of his spear and whaps him down on the ground. This is hard to do with a stack of four units, and Firaxis marketing division is not going to be happy losing the cute animations, so I'm afraid you have to live with no stacking.

If you were playing a boardgame like the Europa series with 5 - 8 counter stacking, you pretty much needed custom-modified Tweezers to handle the stacks and counters without spilling everything from Bagel to Breakfast.
NOT the Good Old Days, by any means!

As for the 'cute animations', if you mean the silly cartoons Civ VI saddled us with, we can do without them. In fact, current games like Humankind and Anno 1800 show how much neat detail you can put into map animations independent of the 'units' and you could always include 'stack animations' showing columns marching across the landscape, stealing chickens and cattle and chasing milkmaids (thus losing any hope of a Family Rating for the game).
People keep coming up with sillier and sillier arguments for 1UPT. They are creative, but no less idiotic: it's a bad mechanic, hopelessly out of time and map scale and - so far, at least - apparently impossible for the AI to handle unless you jack up the movement like Old World does and get an utterly out of scale movement rate that completes all on-map scouting (one of your '4Xs') by the end of the Ancient Era, and also gives you 'battles' that resemble nothing ever seen outside of Fantasy before the advent of Air Mobile Operations in the 1960s.
No Thank You, and again No Thank You, and forever: No Thank You.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

A big stack being a big risk was perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Civ6 is basically a hexagon wargame. I played a lot of Avalon Hill/SPI type games back in the day, and the ones with hexes rapidly iterated to 2-4 unit stacking (sometimes adjusted for terrain) for very good reasons.

It wasn't perfectly balanced. It was a bad system. I know you don't like civ 6 but that doesn't mean the old way of doing it was good.

 

[Civinator]

It wasn't perfectly balanced. It was a bad system.

C3C at least had a very special idea to deal with those stacks of doom: The charm attack. A bombardment with that option halves the defense value of every second unit in the bombarded stack for that turn. This option never made it into standard C3C and was only discovered by hacking the Civ 3 editor and understood only many years later. It is ideal per example for performing a chemical or electronic attack on such a stack of units in the modern era.

 

[aieeegrunt]

It wasn't perfectly balanced. It was a bad system. I know you don't like civ 6 but that doesn't mean the old way of doing it was good.

The AI in Civ6, unlike the older games is completely incapable of posing any sort of threat or even defending itself

Sounds like the old ways worked a lot better

 

[reddishrecue]

The AI in Civ6, unlike the older games is completely incapable of posing any sort of threat or even defending itself

Sounds like the old ways worked a lot better

I think the loyalty and rebellions are the challenges that make the AI difficult to conquer on civ 6. Failed golden ages are also not easy to avoid when you want all the capitals.

 

[Abaxial]

Back in the days of SPI wargames, there were ongoing discussions amongst players of recent titles and forthcoming ones (and remember, this was pre-internet). The hard-core contributors who knew what is meant by mamelon and ravelin (to borrow a phrase) were referred to as "grognards", a name I'm sure I need not explain. Well, my friends, we who are participating in this discussion are the grognards of Civ. Thing is, Firaxis's business plan is not to sell games to grognards. They want high volume sales to the casual market, and the marketing department will look at the cute figures and say, "Yes, we want more of that!". So never mind if animations cause crashes or you turn them off, that's what you're getting.

 

[Krajzen]

Back in the days of SPI wargames, there were ongoing discussions amongst players of recent titles and forthcoming ones (and remember, this was pre-internet). The hard-core contributors who knew what is meant by mamelon and ravelin (to borrow a phrase) were referred to as "grognards", a name I'm sure I need not explain. Well, my friends, we who are participating in this discussion are the grognards of Civ. Thing is, Firaxis's business plan is not to sell games to grognards. They want high volume sales to the casual market, and the marketing department will look at the cute figures and say, "Yes, we want more of that!". So never mind if animations cause crashes or you turn them off, that's what you're getting.

Unless, of course, they can figure out something so cool that it is going to overshadow unit combat animations. Video game sequels frequently get rid of something really cool from previous iterations, for whatever reason. There is a lot of (really/seemingly) cool features of civ4 which were not present in further games. As for civ5 -> civ6 transition, civ6 got rid of 3d Full Screen Colourful Animated Leader Diplomacy Backgrounds Jesus Christ Askia Is Speaking In Front of the Burning City (I actually miss that stuff but I get it was for budget - effort reasons + let's visually focus on leaders themselves). And there were no riots because of that. There weren't even riots because of "mobile game cartoony graphical style", even though like half of fanbase has been roasting this aspect of civ6 since the very first announcement day screenshots. So if Firaxis wants to get rid of combat animations, they will find a way to market that.

Personally I am completely indifferent to combat animations, I tend to turn them off after few games. You don't see them in strategic mode which is very handy, they are always identical anyway, I don't play on CLOSE ZOOM LEVELS TO WATCH INDIVIDUAL GUYS FIGHT, they aren't anything particularly fluent or spectacular, and they waste a lot of time. I really don't think that's that big of a deal.

 

[Gorbles]

it is just lazy coding not taking advantage of the multiple CPUs and other technological advances to chip design.

If I had a penny every time someone mistakenly blamed "not using chipsets to their fullest", I'd literally be a millionaire (what can I say, I read a lot of comments)

Most computers nowadays have multiple cores (the latest Steam Hardware Survey, as inconclusive as that data may be across all of gaming, puts 2 - 8 cores as the range most people are using on both Windows and MacOS). But multithreading has been around a long time. Multicore architecturer is a bit of a different thing, because a) it's hard work, and b) it's only been a few years since single-core CPUs were a fair portion of the market that needed support - especially in the laptop space.

Because that's the problem a lot of the time. It's not that there aren't fancy new quad, hex or octo-core processors with double the number of virtual cores available. It's that the market dictates the level of support a title needs to target (to maximise revenue). And that also correlates vaguely with console performance (for multi-platform franchises in particular). There's also the other problem in that there are different performance metrics available. "time to load" is often lower on the list than, say, runtime performance (ingame). It's an acceptable loss more often than not (though is also massively helped by runtime caching - you'll notice even in Civ 6 subsequent loads in a single session get considerably faster than the initial load, even if you're starting different games in that time).

But let's assume that isn't the problem. Let's assume for a modern title Firaxis are aiming for an average of a quad-core CPU. But they have a codebase that stretches back . . . I don't even want to guess. I was going to reply to a post about the game engine on the other page, so I'm going to fold this in here. Game engines are rarely recreated from scratch. Much like I wouldn't re-implement a TARGA picture format unless there was some weird need to - I'd Google the code fragment and just use that (assuming it worked). Game engines will be upgraded mostly on an as-needed basis (because engine programmers are some of the most valuable and highest-paid job roles in the business), which means you physically can't do the whole thing over each time (unless you have infinite money, but even Valve upgrades its Source tech a module or subsystem at a time. That's just good compartmentalisation for something as extensive and complex as a mature game engine). So Firaxis wants to target quad-core systems, and the performance benchmarks are set around that kind of vision. But they find out a month in that there's something that's just not scaling well. It worked fine in previous titles, on most previous hardware, but the scaling-up of effort due to the new benchmarks has revealed it's not efficient enough for the new throughput. For whatever reason. This isn't a specific example, okay?

So they fix it. They're professional developers. But they only have the time to align it with the benchmark range. Further optimisation is nice to have. Further optimisation is expensive, and delays the engine programmer's time on other projects. It's unlikely to be signed off on, because once the critical issue is resolved, the pressure is immediately less.

The consequence is that the performance is acceptable across a range of hardware on a number of different software configurations, and (why not) consoles as well. It's decent. But people are realising that their hex-core systems aren't seeing vastly better numbers than their friends' quad-core systems. Huh. And I'm not even touching the law of diminishing returns there.

This is just one hypothetical. I work in web (and backend) development, and not in video games. Performance isn't something I thankfully have to worry about a great deal. Do you know how many performance issues I still have to triage? To resolve? Enough! More than enough! The reasons are many and varied, from old code, to poor design decisions, to limited testing, to changes in software, to API vendors deprecating stuff we rely on. And the performance issues I work on are still all relatively in the "nice to fix" category. They're not "this video game literally sets this computer on fire". Because performance in video games is many times more complex than the performance of the (large) cloud platform I work on. At least for the parts of it I work on. I certainly wouldn't want to be a database administrator. We do a lot on the SQL to make sure it runs as efficiently as possible, because that's probably the biggest bottleneck, at least in theory.

* this is a completely fictional account and not actually relevant to Firaxis at all. Just indicative of one of the bazillion stories I've read about the industry.

tl;dr: video game engines are often upgraded on an as-needed basis, with a specific budget. Video games have to support a huge variance of both hardware and software configurations, and are often more close to the "metal" of any particular gaming PC than something like your web browser.

I can guarantee that at least from my time knowing developers (one of the first "MOBA" games shut down the other day - I volunteered for them for the better part of a decade), they know multithreading and multicore stuff better than you're guessing here. What stops it happening are the practicalities of software development.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I think the loyalty and rebellions are the challenges that make the AI difficult to conquer on civ 6. Failed golden ages are also not easy to avoid when you want all the capitals.

They have given us wayyyy too many tools to make loyalty irrelevant. Govenors, certain policy cards etc

Back in the days of SPI wargames, there were ongoing discussions amongst players of recent titles and forthcoming ones (and remember, this was pre-internet). The hard-core contributors who knew what is meant by mamelon and ravelin (to borrow a phrase) were referred to as "grognards", a name I'm sure I need not explain. Well, my friends, we who are participating in this discussion are the grognards of Civ. Thing is, Firaxis's business plan is not to sell games to grognards. They want high volume sales to the casual market, and the marketing department will look at the cute figures and say, "Yes, we want more of that!". So never mind if animations cause crashes or you turn them off, that's what you're getting.

This isn’t a binary thing. You can easily have cute animations with unit stacking

 

[Abaxial]

My experience of the wargaming community is that it can be largely divided into figures gamers and board wargamers, and the overlap is limited. The board wargamers are used to counters, hexes and stacking; the figures gamers are used to arrays of painted metal soldiers on a baize cloth, rulers, and no stacking. Civ 6 is an odd sort of hybrid, in that the units resemble figures, and don't stack, but move on a hexgrid map. Also, the scales are different - figures gamers may play out a Napoleonic battle, but not an entire war or even campaign. If you try and work out the range of a crossbow in km in Civ 6, the answer is absurd, but that doesn't matter because it is a board game rather than a wargame.

The problem with the unit graphics in Civ 6, apparent in the first screenshots as Krajzen says, is that they are just so much worse than those in Civ 5. A spearman unit in Civ 5 has eight wee men and looks like a reasonable representation of a military unit. The same in Civ 6 has only four men, and looks like four pals out for a stroll. And the "ironclad" in Civ 6 is a riverine gunboat that could never operate at sea.

No telling what Civ 7 will look like.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

My experience of the wargaming community is that it can be largely divided into figures gamers and board wargamers, and the overlap is limited. The board wargamers are used to counters, hexes and stacking; the figures gamers are used to arrays of painted metal soldiers on a baize cloth, rulers, and no stacking. Civ 6 is an odd sort of hybrid, in that the units resemble figures, and don't stack, but move on a hexgrid map. Also, the scales are different - figures gamers may play out a Napoleonic battle, but not an entire war or even campaign. If you try and work out the range of a crossbow in km in Civ 6, the answer is absurd, but that doesn't matter because it is a board game rather than a wargame.

The problem with the unit graphics in Civ 6, apparent in the first screenshots as Krajzen says, is that they are just so much worse than those in Civ 5. A spearman unit in Civ 5 has eight wee men and looks like a reasonable representation of a military unit. The same in Civ 6 has only four men, and looks like four pals out for a stroll. And the "ironclad" in Civ 6 is a riverine gunboat that could never operate at sea.

No telling what Civ 7 will look like.

Board games and miniatures games (metal figures on a baize cloth) have one overwhelming difference between them, and it relates to their comparison to computer games.

Miniatures is all about the aesthetics of the game as much as the playing of it. That is, the gamers want their armies to Look Good, they want the spectacle as much as the victory. The period of the late 18th - early 19th century, when military uniforms reached their peak of sartorial splendor (the Napoleonic Wars) has been perennially popular among miniatures players for just that reason (although WWII, with all the varied tanks and equipment resplendent with camouflage painting, slogans on the turrets, etc. is also an extremely popular period for miniatures gamers).

Board games, not so much. In fact, Redmond Symonsen, the graphics designer for the old Simulations Publications (Panzerblitz, Strategic & Tactics magazine) used to do periodic rants about how bad board game graphics were in general. In general, board games have concentrated on making the game's required information as accessible as possible, avoid turning the gamer's stomach with their color choices, and pretty much stopped there.

Other than that, the fact that 99.99% of all miniatures games are strictly about the battlefield and its events and ignore (or nearly ignore) operational or strategic moves completely, while most board games are strategic, grand strategic (like the ancestral Diplomacy or Civilization boardgames of 30+ years ago) or operational in their focus, is a relatively minor point: as it happens, the 4x category, like it or not, is now forced to cover both to some degree: strategy and grand strategy because that is the actual focus of any 200 to 6000 year-spanning game, and tactical because gamers like to watch their little digital armies scamper around and 'role play' (pretend) that they are Alexander the Great, even though most of them are closer to Jubilation T. Cornpone in their tactical acumen.

But it means that describing Civ VI as a 'boardgame in a computer' is not precisely accurate, or more precisely, it illustrates the basic flaw in that concept: computer games are also, both as playable games and as commercial ventures, All About Aesthetics as well. There's a reason why a large percentage of the driving force behind constant upgrades to graphics cards and computing power in PCs is driven by Gaming, not productivity: gamers want games that Look Good, and that means, any more, animated, detailed, and beautiful units (pixilated cardboard counters or static figures Will Not Do) and terrain to play over.
And, as stated, that is where Civ VI missed the mark: compared to other games like the latest AoE, Anno 1800, Humankind, even Old World, the graphics simply look like they are a generation behind.

Of course, workable Game Mechanics that make for a playable and enjoyable game would also be nice, and Civ VI has managed to take every good idea it had in that area and bury them under piles of DLCs until the game has become nearly unplayable. I confess, I have never played into the Information Era, because by the Atomic Era I am so bored and put off by the game that it becomes a chore to continue - and I have better things to do with my time than play a game that is a chore.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

TEH NEXT CIV SHoULD BE ALL ASCII CAHARACTERS!!!!!!!

 

[Abaxial]

I met Redmond Simonsen once! Sadly, he died in 2005. Only 62.

I must have another go at Fallen Enchantress, which solves things by unloading armies onto a tactical map to resolve combat, so you have correct scales for both strategic and tactical combat. It would be a possible way for Civ 7 to go.