A separated tactical map would easily lead to a balance problem that is much more severe. The problem is that when every single battle would be fought in it's own window, taking probably dozens of turns or so, wars would take much longer time. What that means is that either the nature of the game would change towards solely a war game or games would take much longer to finish. Auto resolving is not really an answer as in higher levels you would have to micromanage your tactical battles to win.
Sullla's Ideas for a New Civ
- Thread starter Camikaze
- Start date
A separated tactical map would easily lead to a balance problem that is much more severe. The problem is that when every single battle would be fought in it's own window, taking probably dozens of turns or so, wars would take much longer time. What that means is that either the nature of the game would change towards solely a war game or games would take much longer to finish. Auto resolving is not really an answer as in higher levels you would have to micromanage your tactical battles to win.
Well, the assumption (most probably it's a correct assumption) seems to be that fighting your battles by hand would give you an advantage.
Why do we assume so?
Because it would give us (the human players) the chance to identify this one opportunity during a battle. Sacrifycing one unit to punch a hole into the defense line or whatever.
Or just saving core units in a fight against all odds while still putting some attrition on the enemy.
For sure, such a fight would take some time. There would be some "battle turns" to solve this fight by hand. But any battle in total would still take place in one "main turn" of the game.
Auto-solving on the other hand can be used for battles which are already "pre-determined", like having overwhelming/better equipped/better composed armies.
Or your garrison in that border town is just doomed. So, accept their fate and have the computer run the battle. Why bother with doing it by yourself?
At the end of the day, it would always be the player's choice whether to fight by hand or to leave it to the auto-solving.
As far as I see it, having the option to decide between tactical battlemap and auto-solving would combine the best of both worlds. The one who is interested in the tactical battles would find his pleasure and the one who is only interested in the big-scale decisions only has to care for having a decent military with sufficient troops as the right place at the right time. Literally, being strategically successful.
Why do we assume so?
Because it would give us (the human players) the chance to identify this one opportunity during a battle. Sacrifycing one unit to punch a hole into the defense line or whatever.
Or just saving core units in a fight against all odds while still putting some attrition on the enemy.
For sure, such a fight would take some time. There would be some "battle turns" to solve this fight by hand. But any battle in total would still take place in one "main turn" of the game.
Auto-solving on the other hand can be used for battles which are already "pre-determined", like having overwhelming/better equipped/better composed armies.
Or your garrison in that border town is just doomed. So, accept their fate and have the computer run the battle. Why bother with doing it by yourself?
At the end of the day, it would always be the player's choice whether to fight by hand or to leave it to the auto-solving.
As far as I see it, having the option to decide between tactical battlemap and auto-solving would combine the best of both worlds. The one who is interested in the tactical battles would find his pleasure and the one who is only interested in the big-scale decisions only has to care for having a decent military with sufficient troops as the right place at the right time. Literally, being strategically successful.
KrikkitTwo
Immortal
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- Apr 3, 2004
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- 12,418
Not Really,
If there is a tactical battle map, then there is either
1. a gain from using it (ie for a particular strategy)
OR
2. no point to using it
ALSO
if there is a tactical battle map, the combat engine will be designed around tactical battle.
Because combat is important (a separate problem) then this essentially ruins auto-resolve.
Ideally I'd like combat to be less of a game than city/empire management, you manage cities on a strategic level, you don't play Sim City and decide where to put the marketplace, or if you want the Public School nearby the factory or not. Combat should be the same. I should NOT be deciding the placement of my spearmen relative to the cavalry and catapults
I'd prefer if the Entire game were strategic, not Strategic city management, empire management, diplomacy, and Tactical combat.
That makes for a nice wargame, but civ has become too much of a wargame.
[compare "culture wars" to "military wars" in Civ 4.... in one all you do is build/rush as many culture buildings as possible, and occasionally use a great artist, maybe switch a civic over your whole empire.... in the other you assemble groups of units from your empire, move them along a particular path, then use them in a particular sequence, making sure that you have the right mix of anti-X defenders and siege units and attackers.
Civ 4 combat was TOO tactical, they needed to make it less so, and make "culture combat" MORE "tactical"
Instead they made combat more tactical, and eliminated cultural combat.
Humakty
Happy Goblin
If you took time to read all my post, you'd have noticed I'm rather for a fully automated system, like used in most Paradox games. In those systems you actually have the impression to handle an army.
Still I do think a separate map would be much better to resolve battles, at least up to the industrial era, which saw the first full front line deployments. If you really want tactical battles that is....
If at least civ 5 system was original. But no, it is a downgraded panzer general fighting system, with much less differenciation between units. And at least panzer general wasn't that much out of scale...
And for my part, I find the actual system to be a real sore when I have to move my Grand Imperial Army (20 units....) for 10 consecutive turns. So the micromanagement is still there, even more so than in previous iterations of the game. (In civ 4, I hardly moved more than three stacks at the same time, and could send reinforcment to those stacks without wondering what hexes they'll totally block on their way)
There were ton of options to give Civ the combat system it deserved, and for my part I think the devs fell really far away from the mark. Mixing a 1 UpT system (mostly used in small scale games like General series) with an empire management system doesn't produce anything worth playing.
My main point being we actually have pointless tactical battles to fight on an operational map. And I can't auto resolve the least ! Forced to play it all !
It's a matter of redundancy (and, like any idea you might view as unnecessary, development time). If there is an auto-resolve option and a tactical battle option, then presumably you'll be able to get better results through the tactical battle, or else it would be redundant. But that means that tactical skill is required to get the best result out of your game. Given that warfare is a pretty important part of the game, you'd have to rely on tactics pretty heavily. This diminishes the strategic focus. So it's not that it may not be fun or that it may be not a good system of its own accord, it's that it wouldn't seem appropriate for a specifically strategic game.
In the types of games that do this, taking active control of the battle almost always assures a better result, yes, but that may be because what you the player determine is "better" is different from what the PC thinks. For example, you might use cannon-fodder troops to wear down an enemy, while keeping veteran troops in reserve, whereas the PC just throws troops at the enemy and doesn't prioritize.
All that aside, though, while I can see some of the objections to the system, I have to wonder how many folks here have actually played a game like MOO1, MOO2 or the Heroes of Might and Magic series. The system works fine in those games. You can also autoresolve, but typically you only do that when you have such numerical superiority that you're either guaranteed a positive outcome, or you're guaranteed to not lose enough troops that you care about.
In that sense, if you're clicking "autoresolve," chances are you've already won the battle in a way.
Anyway, I don't see the split as necessarily a problem. If it were possible, I'd say that it's best to have a hybrid option where, during game options choices, you can enable tactical battles, or just use the old "stacking" method.
Comparative speculations are thicker than blood once the watered down assets add nothing to Gameplay. Least we forget, how history unfolds in a TBS title such as our beloved CiV but not as much as we think it really does.
Simply because, we ride the Engine rather than within a simulated bunch of Cinematic sequences trying to mimic strategy in its purest state. Although Barbarians & Ruins are sub_systems for some lucky (or funny) deviations from context and intent.
What Master of Orion ONE_not_2_or_3 (might as well refer to what Sulla introduced as a reference) created was a sweet direct loop off the Engine towards control while still keeping RTS+RPG'ing as features at the TBS levels. Partly, somehow at the tactical level we were all stunned by. X-Com actually spearheaded such interactive styles - pretty successfully at that, btw.
Now that was amazing, AFAIC.
Good luck getting through a Civ game with tactical combat. Imagine marathon speed. It might take 2 months to get through a game. Sullla needs to remember that the majority of the gaming market is casual gamers. They will be overwhelmed by his ideas. If you want to make a game that is for bother the casual and the hardcore gamer, then I suppose you could allow for tactical combat but not make it mandatory.
The problem is that the hardcore are the ones who play multiplayer the most and adding things which slow the game down when one of Civ's biggest problems has always been that multiplayer games take to long, is a bad idea. If you make Civ without multiplayer, you lose a big chunk of the hardcore market. It just doesn't work logistically. Sorry Sullla.
The problem is that the hardcore are the ones who play multiplayer the most and adding things which slow the game down when one of Civ's biggest problems has always been that multiplayer games take to long, is a bad idea. If you make Civ without multiplayer, you lose a big chunk of the hardcore market. It just doesn't work logistically. Sorry Sullla.
Howard Mahler
Since Civ 1
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2003
- Messages
- 619
I started a separate thread on tactical combat maps, since many people do not seem to know what is being talked about.
It has been moved to:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=410319
Many of the same points were raised there as here.
Assumptions:
1. Some people (say they) want tactical combat.
2. Some people do not.
Therefore, one sensible alternative would be not to have tactical combat at all.
One sensible way to implement tactical combat into a game like Civ is to have separate tactical maps.
A nonsensical way to implement tactical combat into a game like Civ is to have one unit per tile on the strategic map; treat the strategic map as if it were a tactical scale map.
If you have tactical maps, then since some players do not want to spend the time fighting out any of the tactical battles or at least all of the tactical battles, you need the autoresolve option.
It has been moved to:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=410319
Many of the same points were raised there as here.
Assumptions:
1. Some people (say they) want tactical combat.
2. Some people do not.
Therefore, one sensible alternative would be not to have tactical combat at all.
One sensible way to implement tactical combat into a game like Civ is to have separate tactical maps.
A nonsensical way to implement tactical combat into a game like Civ is to have one unit per tile on the strategic map; treat the strategic map as if it were a tactical scale map.
If you have tactical maps, then since some players do not want to spend the time fighting out any of the tactical battles or at least all of the tactical battles, you need the autoresolve option.
Donaithnen
Chieftain
Er, Civ5 _does_ have tactical combat. Good luck getting through it?
Going through a marathon game _already_ takes forever, and i really doubt many casual gamers play with that setting.
He already said that auto-resolve should be the default for multiplayer exactly because of the time issue.
And it seems pretty likely that you're yet another person who hasn't actually played much MoO or any of the other games being referenced. Tactical combat really doesn't add that much time. Certainly not in comparison to having to deal with the exact same stuff with the 1UPT system that Civ5 already uses.
Howard Mahler
Since Civ 1
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2003
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- 619
Let me point out that all recent versions of Civilization have an option for players to allow the computer to manage their cities. Presumably some players, sometimes, take advantage of that option.
However, they probably get a worse result than if an expert player actively micromanaged all of the cities.
Thus those players who make use of the automanage option would need to on average play at a slightly lower difficulty level to have the same chance of winning the game as if they actively micromanaged all of their cities.
This is an acceptable option to these players as long as the automanage function does a halfway decent job.
This is just one example.
Players who did not choose to use autoresolve rather spend the time fighting out tactical battles would find this an acceptable option as long as the autoresolve function does a halfway decent job.
However, they probably get a worse result than if an expert player actively micromanaged all of the cities.
Thus those players who make use of the automanage option would need to on average play at a slightly lower difficulty level to have the same chance of winning the game as if they actively micromanaged all of their cities.
This is an acceptable option to these players as long as the automanage function does a halfway decent job.
This is just one example.
Players who did not choose to use autoresolve rather spend the time fighting out tactical battles would find this an acceptable option as long as the autoresolve function does a halfway decent job.
Donaithnen
Chieftain
The point is that some people like tactical combat. They're not happy with resolution at the strategic level. Other people are just fine with letting the computer determine the results (assuming it does a halfway decent job at least.)
And why does it need to have "nice graphics"? Or more particularly, why would it need to have any better graphics than Civ5 _already_ uses for its tactical combat? The fast part is definitely possible given what past games have done. Just design it more like MoO and less like Rot3K and such.
Howard Mahler
Since Civ 1
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- Dec 7, 2003
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- 619
Those who like multiplayer presumably have to agree on the options to be used in any given game.
One could have a multiplayer game in which autoresolve is mandatory.
I see others have made the same reply. (duh.)
"Good luck getting through a Civ game with tactical combat."
One could have a multiplayer game in which autoresolve is mandatory.
I see others have made the same reply. (duh.)
"Good luck getting through a Civ game with tactical combat."
I'm talking about Sullla's idea of having a tactical battlefield. Not Civ5's model. I have played those other games but they don't span nearly as long as Civ ever has.
Tactical combat can add a ton of time depending on how it's handled. Some turn based games, like Lords of the Realm, were pretty much based around the tactical combat with very massive armies. Games didn't span nearly as many turns as Civ, the maps were much smaller, and the games still took hours because of the tactical combat battlefield. Sure you could automate the battles and if you did you'd often finish the game in half an hour or so. The concern I have is that a game like Civ has so much depth to it. It covers more on the turn to turn side than any other game ever made. You have cities, which in turn have tiles to deal with, specialist, buildings. You have very large maps compared to most games. You have tech trees. You have civics/policies. You have culture. You have zones of control. The game is already one of the deepest on the market. It always has been and that's what has made it great. In Civ IV BtS is was already pushing the limits. That's precisely why they (perhaps wrongfully) cut so much of the stuff out and "streamlined" Civ V. Civ IV games got to be so tedious late in the game. There was just too much to keep track of for most players. Sure the hardcore loved it. But they are a small portion of the fan base. Any design changes have to keep the casual gamer in mind if a game is going to be successful.
Heh. I guess I was too vague in that statement. I personally like having the option, but it's going to be quite a challenge to make it so that casual players can still enjoy the game without going into the depth of a tactical battlefield, while still making the tactical battlefield worth dealing with.
I liked the MoO idea Sullla had but I still feel like it's just too much for most casual players. He also mentioned Call to Power. That system was a joke. Basically you got to watch a few volleys and if things were going poorly you could retreat to save your army from total annihilation. It was hardly enough to be game changing and in most games it just got annoying after a while.
I should mention post #33 in this thread for a quick overlook of a tactical "system" with principles that solve two things; 1) Stacks, 2) AI's weaknesses at 1upT combat deployment.
You may want or reject tactical alternatives, but you must first figure out what gameplay features it brings to the attrition model before anything else.
You may want or reject tactical alternatives, but you must first figure out what gameplay features it brings to the attrition model before anything else.
M
Me,myself,and,I
Guest
If the battles in this system are as long as the battles in MoO then it shouldn't take to long.
There's a trade-off. The simpler the battles are, the quicker they will be. What is the "right" amount of tactical depth to satisfy the players like Sullla, and yet not scare off the casual player? It's not an easy task finding the balance. It might exist somewhere, but I just feel like Sullla is naive if he thinks it's that simple. If he were lead designer on the next civ, I think he'd quickly find that the task of implementing his ideas in a way which pleases the masses is extremely daunting.
ohioastronomy
King
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It could be that way if badly designed. But in a single player game you frequently can bring overwhelming force to bear - in effect, allowing players to trade off a bit more of a margin for avoiding the time in the battle. That's certainly what I did in MOO - my son loved to do the battles. I just added a few more ships to the fleet and soaked up a few more losses. So you can end up with a system that works for both sets of players. I do agree with the rest of your post - in effect, that Civ itself would benefit from a more strategic focus overall.
DavesWorld334
Chieftain
- Joined
- May 30, 2010
- Messages
- 5
Sulla,
I like the proposed design and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Anyone quibbling with the ideas who *hasn't* played Master of Magic, Master of Orion, and Civ 1 & 2, I feel, has a severely limited ability to comment on how a 4X game should or shouldn't be designed. Likewise if you don't know what the 4X descriptor above stands for.
Civ5 DID aim itself at the Playstation generation, and to the detriment of the genre. Sulla articulates reasons for his proposed design points, and largely draws them, with attribution, from the most successful and beloved 4Xx games of the genre. Rather than being some sort of sycophantic exercise, this is a case of sticking to prior design decisions in the genre that made for compelling gameplay and fervent fans. Sulla's design is aimed at making a modern 4X game, not at an attempt to suck in RTS or Farmville fans.
I mean, honestly, MoM / MoO / Civ1 / Civ2 are all 15+ year old games that *still* get thousands upon thousands of hours of worldwide play yearly even today when computers have multiple orders of magnitude of capability past what systems did when these games were first programmed. Considering the vast majority of games over the past decade are eminently forgettable within, in most cases, a few weeks of their release, these landmark titles deserve to be respected, and even emulated.
Innovation is important and useful, but new simply for the sake of new does not a better idea make. Just as "it's always been done this way" doesn't also necessarily make for the right decision either. But in the case of these landmark 4X titles, they got many more things, from a game design standpoint, right than they did wrong. In the case of MoM and MoO, 4Xers have been begging for updated versions for the better part of two decades. That ought to say something about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of laying out a design that attempts to coalesce the arguably best parts of them into a modern game.
Specifically about individual points in Sulla's proposal:
* Units stacking into armies and combat occurring tactically - excellent concept, one of the best parts of the push and pull of MoM / MoO gameplay. Auto-move rally points collect the units into stacks, and some of the comments above in the thread by people complaining "that many units seems micro intensive" tells me they clearly didn't play the games. Yes, there are a lot of units, but NO they weren't micro intensive because as you played you didn't think about "what am I doing with my 45,000 fighters/wizards". Instead, you were thinking about "I'll move this army over here, and hold this army there for a few more turns to let additional units reinforce it since its been weakened from heavy combat". In this system, you're managing army stacks in as many or as few stacks as you like / can get away with in the face of your opposition, which almost always held it down to a pretty low number.
* Tile Yields and "tile growth" - again excellent. One of the problems with Civ5 is the value of tiles has been incredibly weakened. Sulla correctly points out there should be value to having a developed tile vs an undeveloped one. Civ5's tiles are wimpy and vastly underpowered compared to the units/buildings/maintenance the player is trying to use them to support. The cottage "growth" factor is, as Sulla points out, an interesting concept that allows a player to apply strategic thinking to how he wants to develop his cities, and forces interesting military decisions to be in a position to defend their terrain.
* Empire growth and maintenance factors - or as Firaxis' latest patch notes termed it "tall vs wide structure". Civ5's global happiness is, as Sulla points out, a punitive factor that does a LOT to take the eXpand X out of what is supposed to be the granddaddy franchise of the 4X genre. Returning to a system of maintenance costs similar to the Civ4 system, which encouraged growth as the empire became able to support more 'width' (and was a brilliant way to avoid the 'problem' Civ1/2 had of ICS being the only viable strategy) would be a good example of sticking with a proven success story of 4X gaming.
* Civics / Social Policies becoming more valuable as the player continues using them - probably one of the truly original ideas Sulla presented, and I'd say a brilliant one. Previous Civs had the switch in and out 'problem' with civics, with the punitive result of anarchy as a method of discouraging a player from switching. As Sulla has pointed out in his earlier essays on 4X and general game design, games should encourage decisions with rewards rather than punishing players with penalties (see Golden Ages vs Dark Ages). Having civic benefits 'grow' as the player remains in them is an excellent design decision.
* Tech Tree - it's debatable whether or not it's a 'bad design decision' to have a set tree that players will eventually min/max down to best paths (i.e., beelining for important results to a player's individual strategy), but MoO did use the method Sulla details as a way to shake up the replay value. Of course, MoO also had 'creative' which enabled a player to give up other benefits in exchange for having full access to the Tech Tree (and, inarguably, in a way that made Creative far and away the most powerful racial bonus in MoO). I would suggest keeping the five tech areas as Sulla outlines them, with the multiple individual techs at each step in an area, but rather than randomizing them allow the player to select (or at least significantly weight towards successfully gaining the selection) the specific tech. However, the proposed use of Great People to pluck a specific tech out of a tree regardless of the randomization is another excellent idea that, again, rewards players for, and encourages, strategic planning as gameplay progresses.
* Diplomacy - Civ5's diplomatic model, and by direct connection the behavior of the AI players, is in my opinion both a failure and bad design. Previous Civs, and indeed other 4X games such as MoO, gave the player the ability to actually form friendships and alliances with AIs that allowed the player to progress their game with the AI as if they were just that; friends and allies. In Civ5, the AI is *always* out to get you, and will *always* turn on you. As someone in another thread said, Civ5 AIs basically hate you whether you are or aren't something (are militarily strong or aren't militarily strong, are economically powerful or aren't economically powerful, etc...). That players might just be 'stringing' an AI player along in friendship until they decide to backstab is their choice, and can be mitigated against by the AI not declining to not protect itself just because the human is its friend, and by the AI always applying distrust factors once the human HAS backstabbed an AI. Sulla's diplo design (and his prior discussions on 4X AI diplomacy) are spot on and largely make for a good 4X design decision.
One thing I would add to Sulla's design would to bring back another of the good features MoM / MoO had, which was race design. Civ has always had set civilizations, but along the lines of how Sulla feels a set Tech Tree will be min/maxed down to good and bad choices, so too the set civs also get similarly boiled down. The ability to build one's wizard in MoM or one's race in MoO was a seemingly simple feature that added to the replay value by several orders of magnitude. Such a system applied to Sulla's "NewCiv" would probably fit in rather well, and with proper play testing and adjustment, the system would at worst have a broad set of 'good' picks vs 'the rest', of which no one playthrough could take advantage of all of the 'good' ones, thus allowing both for players to be granted the ability to enhance their own natural strategic inclinations with game bonuses as well as granting the tremendous replayability benefit of flexible 'civs'.
Sulla's game would be an excellent modern example of a 4X game, and one I feel confident the majority of the 4X community would embrace. Unfortunately, at best, Firaxis' (and their publisher's) machinations with Civ5 seem to clearly indicate they're trying to move beyond the 4X community into the other buckets of gamers. While they might have generated additional sales beyond their 'core 4X player base', I think the furor and intense discussions over Civ5's state and status have proven they've done so at the cost of alienating a measurable percentage of the Civ franchise's previously loyal fans.
Unfortunately, the era of game companies having only themselves and their own success to answer to are long past. Publisher organizations have taken over gaming and are rapidly stomping almost every game genre towards the lowest common denominator; the umbrella corporations aren't happy with mere "success" within a genre. They want properties that will yield tens of millions of units sold. Unfortunately, there are probably only two or three game genres that can realistically marshal those kinds of sales figures. 4X is very probably not one of them; but that clearly hasn't stopped 2K Games from having pushed Civ5 in directions they obviously hoped would at least knock at those doors.
Why do I mention the things I did in the previous two paragraphs? Because I think it means absent a Stardock or some other classically styled game company (i.e., an independent who hasn't been snapped up by an Activision, 2K, Take Two, etc...), Sulla's game design will never be made. After all, where's the vast profit in merely satisfying your core genre's players when one can burn them while gathering in percentages of neighboring genres' players. Sulla's design is a classic 4x game pitched to satisfy those 4X gamers who've grown up in the genre, and there just aren't as many of us as there are FPS, RTS or MMORPG gamers, and that leaves us lowly 4Xers scrabbling for the scraps of the industry in hopes of finding a new game that will satisfy us as much as classics such as Master of Magic and Master of Orion did.
Sulla, here's hoping you or someone who supports you wins the lottery, so you can get this game made.
I like the proposed design and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Anyone quibbling with the ideas who *hasn't* played Master of Magic, Master of Orion, and Civ 1 & 2, I feel, has a severely limited ability to comment on how a 4X game should or shouldn't be designed. Likewise if you don't know what the 4X descriptor above stands for.
Civ5 DID aim itself at the Playstation generation, and to the detriment of the genre. Sulla articulates reasons for his proposed design points, and largely draws them, with attribution, from the most successful and beloved 4Xx games of the genre. Rather than being some sort of sycophantic exercise, this is a case of sticking to prior design decisions in the genre that made for compelling gameplay and fervent fans. Sulla's design is aimed at making a modern 4X game, not at an attempt to suck in RTS or Farmville fans.
I mean, honestly, MoM / MoO / Civ1 / Civ2 are all 15+ year old games that *still* get thousands upon thousands of hours of worldwide play yearly even today when computers have multiple orders of magnitude of capability past what systems did when these games were first programmed. Considering the vast majority of games over the past decade are eminently forgettable within, in most cases, a few weeks of their release, these landmark titles deserve to be respected, and even emulated.
Innovation is important and useful, but new simply for the sake of new does not a better idea make. Just as "it's always been done this way" doesn't also necessarily make for the right decision either. But in the case of these landmark 4X titles, they got many more things, from a game design standpoint, right than they did wrong. In the case of MoM and MoO, 4Xers have been begging for updated versions for the better part of two decades. That ought to say something about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of laying out a design that attempts to coalesce the arguably best parts of them into a modern game.
Specifically about individual points in Sulla's proposal:
* Units stacking into armies and combat occurring tactically - excellent concept, one of the best parts of the push and pull of MoM / MoO gameplay. Auto-move rally points collect the units into stacks, and some of the comments above in the thread by people complaining "that many units seems micro intensive" tells me they clearly didn't play the games. Yes, there are a lot of units, but NO they weren't micro intensive because as you played you didn't think about "what am I doing with my 45,000 fighters/wizards". Instead, you were thinking about "I'll move this army over here, and hold this army there for a few more turns to let additional units reinforce it since its been weakened from heavy combat". In this system, you're managing army stacks in as many or as few stacks as you like / can get away with in the face of your opposition, which almost always held it down to a pretty low number.
* Tile Yields and "tile growth" - again excellent. One of the problems with Civ5 is the value of tiles has been incredibly weakened. Sulla correctly points out there should be value to having a developed tile vs an undeveloped one. Civ5's tiles are wimpy and vastly underpowered compared to the units/buildings/maintenance the player is trying to use them to support. The cottage "growth" factor is, as Sulla points out, an interesting concept that allows a player to apply strategic thinking to how he wants to develop his cities, and forces interesting military decisions to be in a position to defend their terrain.
* Empire growth and maintenance factors - or as Firaxis' latest patch notes termed it "tall vs wide structure". Civ5's global happiness is, as Sulla points out, a punitive factor that does a LOT to take the eXpand X out of what is supposed to be the granddaddy franchise of the 4X genre. Returning to a system of maintenance costs similar to the Civ4 system, which encouraged growth as the empire became able to support more 'width' (and was a brilliant way to avoid the 'problem' Civ1/2 had of ICS being the only viable strategy) would be a good example of sticking with a proven success story of 4X gaming.
* Civics / Social Policies becoming more valuable as the player continues using them - probably one of the truly original ideas Sulla presented, and I'd say a brilliant one. Previous Civs had the switch in and out 'problem' with civics, with the punitive result of anarchy as a method of discouraging a player from switching. As Sulla has pointed out in his earlier essays on 4X and general game design, games should encourage decisions with rewards rather than punishing players with penalties (see Golden Ages vs Dark Ages). Having civic benefits 'grow' as the player remains in them is an excellent design decision.
* Tech Tree - it's debatable whether or not it's a 'bad design decision' to have a set tree that players will eventually min/max down to best paths (i.e., beelining for important results to a player's individual strategy), but MoO did use the method Sulla details as a way to shake up the replay value. Of course, MoO also had 'creative' which enabled a player to give up other benefits in exchange for having full access to the Tech Tree (and, inarguably, in a way that made Creative far and away the most powerful racial bonus in MoO). I would suggest keeping the five tech areas as Sulla outlines them, with the multiple individual techs at each step in an area, but rather than randomizing them allow the player to select (or at least significantly weight towards successfully gaining the selection) the specific tech. However, the proposed use of Great People to pluck a specific tech out of a tree regardless of the randomization is another excellent idea that, again, rewards players for, and encourages, strategic planning as gameplay progresses.
* Diplomacy - Civ5's diplomatic model, and by direct connection the behavior of the AI players, is in my opinion both a failure and bad design. Previous Civs, and indeed other 4X games such as MoO, gave the player the ability to actually form friendships and alliances with AIs that allowed the player to progress their game with the AI as if they were just that; friends and allies. In Civ5, the AI is *always* out to get you, and will *always* turn on you. As someone in another thread said, Civ5 AIs basically hate you whether you are or aren't something (are militarily strong or aren't militarily strong, are economically powerful or aren't economically powerful, etc...). That players might just be 'stringing' an AI player along in friendship until they decide to backstab is their choice, and can be mitigated against by the AI not declining to not protect itself just because the human is its friend, and by the AI always applying distrust factors once the human HAS backstabbed an AI. Sulla's diplo design (and his prior discussions on 4X AI diplomacy) are spot on and largely make for a good 4X design decision.
One thing I would add to Sulla's design would to bring back another of the good features MoM / MoO had, which was race design. Civ has always had set civilizations, but along the lines of how Sulla feels a set Tech Tree will be min/maxed down to good and bad choices, so too the set civs also get similarly boiled down. The ability to build one's wizard in MoM or one's race in MoO was a seemingly simple feature that added to the replay value by several orders of magnitude. Such a system applied to Sulla's "NewCiv" would probably fit in rather well, and with proper play testing and adjustment, the system would at worst have a broad set of 'good' picks vs 'the rest', of which no one playthrough could take advantage of all of the 'good' ones, thus allowing both for players to be granted the ability to enhance their own natural strategic inclinations with game bonuses as well as granting the tremendous replayability benefit of flexible 'civs'.
Sulla's game would be an excellent modern example of a 4X game, and one I feel confident the majority of the 4X community would embrace. Unfortunately, at best, Firaxis' (and their publisher's) machinations with Civ5 seem to clearly indicate they're trying to move beyond the 4X community into the other buckets of gamers. While they might have generated additional sales beyond their 'core 4X player base', I think the furor and intense discussions over Civ5's state and status have proven they've done so at the cost of alienating a measurable percentage of the Civ franchise's previously loyal fans.
Unfortunately, the era of game companies having only themselves and their own success to answer to are long past. Publisher organizations have taken over gaming and are rapidly stomping almost every game genre towards the lowest common denominator; the umbrella corporations aren't happy with mere "success" within a genre. They want properties that will yield tens of millions of units sold. Unfortunately, there are probably only two or three game genres that can realistically marshal those kinds of sales figures. 4X is very probably not one of them; but that clearly hasn't stopped 2K Games from having pushed Civ5 in directions they obviously hoped would at least knock at those doors.
Why do I mention the things I did in the previous two paragraphs? Because I think it means absent a Stardock or some other classically styled game company (i.e., an independent who hasn't been snapped up by an Activision, 2K, Take Two, etc...), Sulla's game design will never be made. After all, where's the vast profit in merely satisfying your core genre's players when one can burn them while gathering in percentages of neighboring genres' players. Sulla's design is a classic 4x game pitched to satisfy those 4X gamers who've grown up in the genre, and there just aren't as many of us as there are FPS, RTS or MMORPG gamers, and that leaves us lowly 4Xers scrabbling for the scraps of the industry in hopes of finding a new game that will satisfy us as much as classics such as Master of Magic and Master of Orion did.
Sulla, here's hoping you or someone who supports you wins the lottery, so you can get this game made.
Excellent post and a very good summation of what Sullla has outlined previously.
Sadly, as you said, this game quite possibly will never get made.
They don't make them like they used to. cIV could very well have been the last hurrah for a dying age...
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