Team Play: Completely broken in single player

[shenryyr]

broken record time: we paid 50 bucks to be beta testers. this is the gaming industry today. many other games are released this way. it has become acceptable to rely on end-user complaints to develop patches to fix errors that were not caught during the limited in-house testing. some of them were probably written down during testing but could not be addressed before the game's release date. rather than facing the public with 'we're not done yet, we want to get it right', they simply release it anyway and deal with angry people later.

lots of big name developers do this, it should not come as a surprise anymore. the place you see it happen most frequently is in gaming series, where one developer has passed the game on to another developer over the years, who promises to do a better job for less investment cash. all that translates to is: pretty graphics and crappy programming(and upset/fired employees).

 

[The_J]

In Civ5 it not even translates to "working graphics" >.<
And you can't call the rivers pretty.

Hey, a mod making a sarcasm post

I don't have to think positive about this game to moderate here .

Well, given how the AI acts by itself , you should really not have high hopes on teaming with them. But the fact that you put a option to perma-ally and not make that AI love you no matter what is ... stupid , atleast ( btw, i've been noticing that I've been using the word stupid a lot regarding civ V game mechanics ...)

I would not even expect the AI to behave like in a team.
I don't mean that it will further behave stupid, i mean that i expect that Lord Parkin in his next post will rage about that his ally has declared war on him.
Seeing that this can happen with city states, i don't expect that they implemented such basic logic here.

Lol even the moderators are dissing this game. I don't know if I should laugh or cry...

Just both.
Note that i'm only talking about the bugs, not the gameplay itself.

 

[Lord Parkin]

(From this thread)

- Social Policies are separate for every team member, not combined for the team as a whole. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it seems wrong. It contributes more to the feeling of teammates playing separate games with their empires than managing a cooperative strategy together.

After some further thought, I think that perhaps the most sensible solution would be to combine overall culture for teams (obviously raising the thresholds for adopting policies as required for balance), but let teammates adopt different policies.

This way, all teammates get the opportunity to pick a new policy at the same time. This would make it a bit less restrictive on the social policy side, but would still give a feeling of coherence and cohesion to playing on a team.

In the present form with separate culture though, there are numerous potential exploits. Just one potential exploit off the top of my head is that one teammate can sit with a couple of cities and mass culture and policies, while the other expands like crazy (through Settlers and war). Then, partway through the game, the civ with lots of the cities and few policies switches most of the cities over to the civ with lots of policies and few cities. I'm sure you can see the obvious problem here.

 

[Lord Parkin]

More problems:

- The Great Library was built by an AI teammate, and it didn't appear to give me their free tech. The Pyramids was built by an AI teammate, and it does not seem to have sped up my Worker speed. I suspect this is going to be the case for all wonders. In Civ4 they had shared benefits in teams, which made sense. What's up with Civ5?

- AI teammates offer excess resources to other civs with preference over your own. This is backwards; in Civ4 they always offered excess resources to you first.

- No control over which City States your AI teammates go to war with. This not only means they can attack a city state you were hoping to ally with soon, but they can ruin your chances to gain future city state allies because of their warmongering ("City States band together" event). The power to control wars with City States in a team with one human player and the rest AI players should ALWAYS reside with the human player.

- The above also makes me suspicious that AI teammates may be able to declare war on other civs without your consent. As before, in a team with one human player and the rest AI players, this power should always rest with the human player.

 

[Thormodr]

Wow. Just wow. I thought ciV couldn't get any worse.

Did they even test the game?

Oh and the game does have nice music. I'll give it that.

 

[jacyp]

So I just started up a team game with the AI to see whether any more thought had been put into it than the rest of the game.

I thought about doing that right the first day I've bought the game, cos me and my brother like to play teamed up against AI teams and I also thought teaming up with the AI to have full vision of what they are doing would give me better situations to catch some bugs.

But after thinking about it for a minute, I've came to the same conclusion as The_J's:

But seriously, how can you dare to insist on working AI in teamplay? It's already broken when you play alone.

What bothers me most is that I don't believe the hype about any game, that much is very true (and that's why I didn't pre-order the game), but I do believe in some detailed reviews from, at least I thought they were, honest review sites after the game was released and you don't read about absolutely no problems in any of them.

The game is only recieving praises everywhere, it's like they've got a bug-free version of it.

So now I can't trust the hype, can't trust the demos, can't trust review sites that should be unbiased but apparently are all sold outs now.

The gaming industry is taking several steps backwards and putting to lost everything that was hard conquered through decades of dedication of the fans.

 

[da_Vinci]

The game is only recieving praises everywhere, it's like they've got a bug-free version of it.

Emperor's new clothes ...

dV

 

[Louis XXIV]

First thought, there's a team play in single player?

It sounds like this is minimally implemented. There are ways for the AI to like you. It even goes up to an opinion level of "allied" (unforgivable, enemy, competitor, favorable, friend, ally) assuming the XML file here is accurate. What they act like when allied, I have no clue. It seems they should be set to that standard during team play, but it seems they only added the minimal mechanical features to make it technically team play.

 

[Lord Parkin]

First thought, there's a team play in single player?

Indeed. There is in Civ4 as well, and it pretty much worked right out of the box. In Civ5, not so much, obviously.

It sounds like this is minimally implemented. There are ways for the AI to like you. It even goes up to an opinion level of "allied" (unforgivable, enemy, competitor, favorable, friend, ally) assuming the XML file here is accurate. What they act like when allied, I have no clue.

I also have no idea. I've never seen them act in a way that portrays anything other than two emotional states: hostility or indifference. Either the AI can potentially like you but has no programmed methods to express it... or else it literally cannot comprehend the concept of friendship in its present state. The latter seems to be the more likely explanation given my experiences in all my games lately, at least on the higher levels.

It seems they should be set to that standard during team play, but it seems they only added the minimal mechanical features to make it technically team play.

Indeed. It was clearly a rushed afterthought. Perhaps someone at Firaxis suddenly pointed out that Civ4 had this option and people would be expecting it, so they quickly shoved it into the game without any time to test it.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Visually, yes, the AI doesn't have any other physical expressions (that I've seen) or speech (this I know) besides angry and neutral. But it's possible they do behave differently for the allied.

One way to test this for those far less lazy than me would be to create a map with a whole bunch of AI workers starting near barb camps. Let them get captured and then liberate them. Liberating three AI workers should bring you to allied status if the numbers are correct. Have the scenario allow you to liberate 10 workers to give you a buffer and see how they act the rest of the game.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Visually, yes, the AI doesn't have any other physical expressions (that I've seen) or speech (this I know) besides angry and neutral. But it's possible they do behave differently for the allied.

One way to test this for those far less lazy than me would be to create a map with a whole bunch of AI workers starting near barb camps. Let them get captured and then liberate them. Liberating three AI workers should bring you to allied status if the numbers are correct. Have the scenario allow you to liberate 10 workers to give you a buffer and see how they act the rest of the game.

It'd be an interesting experiment I guess. Would be interested to hear the result if anyone checks it out.

Still, it's kind of an unrealistic circumstance. In a proper game playing on the higher levels, the AI never has much of a chance of liking you due to the extreme negative diplo weights given to percieved weakness and close settling, regardless of liberating a few units and the like.