"Too Many Clicks!"

[Jonathan]

Thanks to Thunderfall for drawing attention to this article.

Although Philip Goetz rambles on a bit too long, and his insistence on the rule of seven seems too dogmatic (as he says himself, chess players cope with sixteen units), basically the point he makes is very sound and needs to be made more often.

Civ is quite a fun game near the beginning because there are few cities and few units, and because the decisions to be made are interesting.

It's a dull and dreary game near the end because there are too many cities, too many units, and the decisions to be made are very repetitive and have long since ceased to be interesting.

I've played every version of Civ from 1 to 4, always hoping that the next version would turn out better; and there have indeed been improvements with every version, but not the fundamental improvements that the game needs.

Civ is a good game concept but a poor game design, and I've almost given up hope that Firaxis will ever get it right.

For people who think that Civ is fine as it is: well, aren't you the lucky ones. All computer games seem to be made for people like you. No-one makes computer games for people like me. Although I think there are quite a lot of people like me, in this respect.

 

[Charles 22]

Civ4 is about managing your production and workers. The "fighting" is definitely secondary, although it can take most of the time. If you really are interested primarily in the fighting, why are you playing Civ, instead of an alternative game that has a lot more emphasis on tactics without all of that annoying economic development that you find uninteresting?

It's not that I find the building etc. uninteresting, in fact that's the majority of my game, but the first two hundred turns, as I play it, have little or nothing to do with fighting, and even the building is very slow because the economy hasn't done enough to make that more interesting yet. It's mostly socuting like I said.



You're paying a huge penalty, either way.

So what's the penalty for grouping 6 horse archers together? I don't get your point. The only way I see there being a penalty as such is if you attack and don't want some of them bogged down because it didn't require all of them attacking (in which case you can split them off anyway). If you have say 5 armies, one in each tile, and they could all move at once, which is what I think you're wanting, the same rules for keeping formation apply with the game as-is, only the game as-is requires 5 moves instead of one. It's not what you're looking for admitadly but my point is there's a way around moving every lasted unit every turn and I see not a whole lot of downside unless you then want to start splitting them all over again, which, could even be necessary if all the armies moved at once.

So do units in such an army lose their promotions or what? Where's the disadvantage? Either the one move for 5 armies or the five moves per five armies, are both going to run into problems covering more tiles if they want and then you get into some measure of single units again, until they joing back up and maybe form three unit armies. I have used armies to some extent, just by accident mostly, and it is somethign of a pain splitting them back into individual units, but then again no matter the size of the army and the ease of moving them, when it comes time to covering more tiles splitting will have to be done.

Anyway, awaiting you response.

 

[DaviddesJ]

So what's the penalty for grouping 6 horse archers together? I don't get your point.

If an enemy city needs only 4 horse archers to capture, then 2 of your 6 are wasted; they could have been advancing on a different city.

If you move them all together, when some are wounded, then either the wounded units don't get a chance to heal, or the unwounded units are wasting turns when they could be advancing.

Inside enemy territory, you aren't "parking" them on several different tiles, cutting enemy city production, or pillaging several tiles at once.

When you transport them on ships, you need different grouping sizes, and different mixes of units, depending on where you're going. Transporting several units for several turns (as opposed to chaining a smaller number of units from ship to ship to ship in a single turn) is less efficient.

 

[Charles 22]

If an enemy city needs only 4 horse archers to capture, then 2 of your 6 are wasted; they could have been advancing on a different city.

If you move them all together, when some are wounded, then either the wounded units don't get a chance to heal, or the unwounded units are wasting turns when they could be advancing.

Inside enemy territory, you aren't "parking" them on several different tiles, cutting enemy city production, or pillaging several tiles at once.

When you transport them on ships, you need different grouping sizes, and different mixes of units, depending on where you're going. Transporting several units for several turns (as opposed to chaining a smaller number of units from ship to ship to ship in a single turn) is less efficient.

Alright, but wouldn't you have the same problems with armies period, irrespective of whether they all moved at once or each one required a move?

 

[DaviddesJ]

Alright, but wouldn't you have the same problems with armies period, irrespective of whether they all moved at once or each one required a move?

I don't know what you mean by an "army", I guess. Civ4 discourages players from keeping units together in a single group for an extended period of time; it's better to keep constantly grouping and regrouping, separating and joining, different collections of units, as circumstances and your needs change. This takes a lot of time. Thus the argument that the game should give some incentive for groups of units to stay together. If there were a compensation for keeping your units together, you would do it more often, and thus the total amount of micromangement could (perhaps) be reduced.

 

[Charles 22]

I don't know what you mean by an "army", I guess. Civ4 discourages players from keeping units together in a single group for an extended period of time; it's better to keep constantly grouping and regrouping, separating and joining, different collections of units, as circumstances and your needs change. This takes a lot of time. Thus the argument that the game should give some incentive for groups of units to stay together. If there were a compensation for keeping your units together, you would do it more often, and thus the total amount of micromangement could (perhaps) be reduced.

I don't know. I'm operating under the idea that there is something more to making these armies (armies are formed by double clicking a unit and then every unit in that tile is made into an army). The reason why armies aren't more functional, or at least not on the Civ3 level, I suspect, had largely to do with that the AI didn't hardly build them, which of course were actually "built" in Civ3 as opposed to the current method. I would suppose they found it too difficult to program the AI into taking advantage of armies, no matter how beneficial they were, so they decided to more or less drop them for Civ4. You would think they could do something along the Civ3 lines but maybe just make the armies with less upside.

I still think the fundamental problem with armies in Civ4 is very largely based on people not having any obvious fighting advantages with them and so they don't want to use them. Couple that with there's no need for armies to make things easier for much of the game and people don't try to take the only advantage that armies offer, potentially more ease of movement, and instead would rather complain that they are forced to move tens if not hundreds of single units every turn. It's too bad that you can't single unit move throughout the game with the same relative ease, but you have to try to adjust or die I say, and I plan on taking very seriously an adjusting angle should my lousy play ever get me to the modern era again .

Even if grouping them into quantities of ten or more doesn't turn out to be very helpful, and I can't see how it can't if you're talking about moving over a hundred total units in attack, but surely with that many units there's something to be said for smaller armies, maybe three or five unit armies. If you're decimating your enemies with not only quality, but also quantity, then how much would you lose by not having single units running here and there, when evitably you will group a good number of them for city assault anyway?

I hope more of us who can't stand moving single units all the time, will give the army useage a good deal of work and let us know just how well it can be used. Even with just 100 marauding units you could probably afford to group 50 of them into 5 seperate armies and leave the rest singular. With 100 units, that alone, assuming you wouldn't break them apart again, would save you 45 clicks a turn (50 single units moved and 5 armies moved [the 5 armies, if unformed, would have been another 50 moves]).

 

[Carl v.]

Gamers have to make “Too many clicks!” to play CIV, and especially in the endgame. According to the posts, there is no real disagreement about this. But gamers express the fear of loosing control by letting the AI control more functions than today. The main reason for this, is poor performance of automated workers.

In another post, I have described CIV as a game on the operational and strategical level (see: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=182118). But it is also possible to play on operational and a kind of tactical level:

The game interface works well when we treat each city as a city, each building only as a building, and each unit as one unit; Today we start building a monument, next thing is building a cottage. This functions like the ancient Greek town-states. Every time the gamer act as an interior ruler, he rules only one and one city at a time. Synergy is achieved when the different cities produce coordinated.

In such a context, one can view each unit as such, and take some kind of tactical control in the field by utilizing the terrain. But still the outcome of battle is decided by the AI as a result of rigid parameters (unit, promotions, terrain defence value, and some kind of random generator).

If one looks at CIV as a strategy game, the first settler can be seen as a whole tribe, big enough to have its own language and culture (nation). And they settle in an area; the capital square is the first area where the former nomadic tribe build their houses. The worked tiles are where people live outside the capital. So the number of people on the city screen, is the whole population in an area, not only the city.

Still, it works fine as long as we like it as barbarians in town states.

But history shows that this organisation did not work when the units (states) grew bigger. The mere size of matters demanded a system where one gave the orders, and others carried them out. In CIV, we, the supreme emperor, have to do it ourselves. When the civics change, the interface does not.

But there is a way to beat the MABS (Modern Age Burnout Syndrom).

Most of us use the default number of opponents when choosing a map size. But if one increases the number of other powers far beyond default, the situation is getting interesting.

The obvious result of let us say 10 AI civs on a small map, is smaller nations. Instead of clicking 30 cities, one can govern a country made up of three larger areas (The capital of the empire, and two other cities). And in case of hostilities, the gamer has let us say 15 different units in the field instead of 150. (Ok, seems a little, but the other nations build units under the same conditions as oneself.)

Fewer “cities” (in this context the fat cross representing large areas like Arizona or Baden-Württemberg) has other impacts than just fewer clicks. First of all, money: Fewer “cities” (or local capitals like Madison) mean less maintenance costs. On the other hand: Fewer marketplaces and banks produce less money. And few libraries and universities have a rather poor science output.

This low level science output makes it necessary to explore the world and get in touch with other civilisations asap to establish science and resources trade. Resources will be rare, and in many cases situated in another country.

Compared to its costs, wonders will have lesser impact on your state than in default-mode.

After testing this concept, I found diplomacy and trading more challenging. Without proper tech-trading you are lost, even on low levels. I also had capacity to pay much more attention to the diplomacy-screens and had a better overall view of my opponents.

We can not do anything to the town-state interface. But it is possible to change the size of the “cities” and beat the MABS.

 

[Coburn]

The Philip Goetz article is interesting, and I suspect that it will be influential in shaping design of Civ 5. I play Civ to think and relax, not to engage in a manic search for hot buttons etc, which characterize RTS.
Having read the reactions in this forum, my impression is that the key concept that will be developed in Civ5 pertains to delegation. This probably means the advisors become more important with considerable work given to advisor-specific dialogue boxes to minimize the possibility of the AI taking off in an unintended direction (as many forum contributers have noted), and let the advisors execute the human player's strategy. Some advisors would need little micro-management (Science, Trade, Culture), while Domestic and Military advisors would require quite a bit more. How to incorporate the feasible set of strategic choices for these advisors is a key programming challenge. Obviously these will be affected as new technologies become available , whether the civ is in peace or war. Typically delegation involves working on an agreed plan of action, with enough information available for the boss to able to work out whether ongoing results are satisfactory or not, which enough information for the boss to anticipate what the subordinate will do next. It will take quite a bit of work to get this right, before we can even begin to think about the possibility of a feral advisor, however interesting the prospect of this may sound.
To me Civ is about grand strategy motivated by history. It is a game about leadership, making effective choices subject to uncertainty. It emphasizes contextual intelligence, at which the AI struggles. Effective leaders in history have shown the capacity to know when to delegate and judging when the time is right to take direct control. Think of Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, over-riding his admirals and taking close control of individual naval units during the blockade, being very concerned not to repeat the mistakes of WW1, when mobilization schedules severely constrained diplomatic options. So, if the designers are thinking hard about delegation, my advice is - make it easy for the player to come in and over-ride the advisor. Also make sure the game provides enough information so that the player can anticipate what the advisor plans to do in coming 3 or 4 turns.

 

[evirus]

the problem, i think, with most strategy games, mostly RTS's is that inorder to become better, the player MUST learn the hotkeys, degrading the game play down from strategy, to a twich based game.

i agree that civ4 is peaking in terms of too much control, but like said earlier you still have to appeal to both camps; rushers and turtelers, why not after you build the unit they stay in the city and just shut up untill you go into the city and "activate" them, build an army and load the units you want to use into the army and send them off. with that you dont have to focus on several units at a time if you dont want too.

 

[Landstander]

I certainly hope Firaxis takes the time to read this thread. It appears that most of us agree that the early-mid game period is near-perfect, while the late game becomes increasingly tedious and, ultimately, boring.

I have long thought that different eras should usher in different game play concepts - simply because ancient or medieval armies, economies and societies function so very differently from industrial or modern ones. This could be a reasonable way of approaching endgame tedium. (Or, as someone else alluded to, this could be achieved through civic selection).

In practice, cities could become less autonomous and more a component of a nation-state. This could help to simplify the Worker system, food distribution, and even building orders (units and structures) by transforming them into nation-based instead of city-based systems. Hence, early-mid game management remains the same while late game mechanics could compensate for the complexities of the 25 city, 200 unit empire we are trying to run.

This would also add a touch of realism. I.e. - here in San Francisco our food comes from all over the nation, our power from across the state, our military training and basing is only at specific locations, and our economy is, of course, intimately linked to the rest of the nation's (or even world's) economy.

 

[Coburn]

There is a preference for incremental improvements to the underlying game, rather than re-engineering the game from the basic precepts.

And I suspect the solution to "too many clicks" will involve ways of improving the capacity to group units together.

This is particularly important in the military sphere. To this end I offer a modest suggestion, one that improves options for grouping, adds to (hate to say) "realism" of the game and makes it easier for a leader to exert strategic control over military units.

its a variation of the Civ3 army idea. Works like this. At any age, you can produce army officers, who would cost as much to produce as say a stock standard defensive unit. Their creation does not arise from direct combat. However their effectiveness is a function of experience in combat.

Each officer has 3 functions.

First they group units together into collective fighting units (as in C3 but with differences). The more basic the level of tech, the smaller number of units that can be grouped. At the base level you have a company commander comprising 3 units, then a battalion commander comprising 9 units, and so on.

The second function officers have is what I call a "zone of command". Sort of works like the zone of tiles claimed by a settler (before he settles, that is). So the officer sits in the middle of the zone of command, and units in the army "spread out" to occupy the zone of command. The better the technology, the better the officer, the bigger the army, the bigger the zone of command. This is a improvement on C3 army which stacks all units in one tile, which enables enemy units freedom to occupy strategic ground (like mountains). My suggestion rules this out, and it enables an army to defend a mountain ridge, or a city, for example.

The third function concerns strategic mission. Options here could include (i) dig in and defend (adds to strength rating if attacked); (ii) patrol/recon; (iii) annoy/harass neighbours/barbarians (in peacetime); (iv) mobility alert (say via additional movement points, earmaking the army for offensive purposes). This is accessed via right click on the officer.

As a secondary point - I propose that the strength rating of indiviudal units that fight in an army improve by virtue of being in the army. However unlike C3, armies can lose individual units, as well as suffer weakness collectively.

 

[Pudd'nhead]

I certainly hope Firaxis takes the time to read this thread. It appears that most of us agree that the early-mid game period is near-perfect, while the late game becomes increasingly tedious and, ultimately, boring.

I have long thought that different eras should usher in different game play concepts - simply because ancient or medieval armies, economies and societies function so very differently from industrial or modern ones. This could be a reasonable way of approaching endgame tedium. (Or, as someone else alluded to, this could be achieved through civic selection).

In practice, cities could become less autonomous and more a component of a nation-state. This could help to simplify the Worker system, food distribution, and even building orders (units and structures) by transforming them into nation-based instead of city-based systems. Hence, early-mid game management remains the same while late game mechanics could compensate for the complexities of the 25 city, 200 unit empire we are trying to run

Yes, I hope they do too. This is exactly what I was thinking as I read this very interesting thread for the first time today. Like Jonathon I also have played civ I, and though I barely bothered with civ 2 & civ 3 for personal time demand reasons, I've returned to playing computer games after a ~10 year hiatus in the last year or two, as my son gets old enough to enjoy them too. I think this thread proves what I have felt about this end-game tedium, no better in civ4 than in the original (and maybe worse, if you factor in that *I* have changed & need to be able to make smaller time commitments), is a common opinion. Civ is a fantastic game but quite frankly I have only been able to play 2-3 games to completion, mostly I just give up on because it all seemed a fait accompli (only the space race seems to give any sense of drama). Although it is a fantastic game, I wonder how many more games I have left in me. Two? Three?

But it is the last couple paragraphs that I quote that struck a chord with my thoughts as I read the discussion here. What we need is a game -- whether it is called Civ is immaterial (in fact maybe it shouldn't since it will deviate significantly from the Sid Meier model) -- in which the current civ is only the first "minigame." At some point (maybe controlled by player, or preset conditions being met?) the existing game state is translated into a starting game state for the next minigame ... thus continuation of the epic sweep of the subject, without the the continuation of constant small-scale interface which leads to monotony.

What would a second stage mini-game look like? I'm not sure, but Jonathon & some others sound like they've been playing computer strategy games a while just like me, so maybe there are a few people that remember "Balance of Power" by Chris Crawford? It was a simulation of superpower global politics, where 3rd world countries were proxy military & ideological battlefields, and the primary weapons were economic & military aid and destabilization actions (direct military intervention also was an option, but realistically it was very expensive & risky and might threaten undoing the effects of all your other actions in all other regions of the world). 15 years ago I thought of Meier and Crawford as the two giants of computer strategy gaming. Sadly I fear this is a forgotten gem, probably largely due to two factors: it only came out on the mac & atari ST, no PC version, 2) a lot of players (not me) were turned off by the "lose-lose" scenario if you pushed the computer opponent too hard, the tension level might go to defcon 1 and once nuclear war starts, NO ONE won. Anyway, I think those are irrrelevant to the real lesson of the game, that the modern struggle of civilizations is very different from the ancient ones. In other words, the Civ series makes a lot of sense (and a lot of enjoyment) as an early era class of civilization simulation, because miltary and tech are the framework of how supremacy really was achieved (well, leaving out leadership ... but that is what the human player is supposed to bring to the game!). But contest of civilizations in the modern world is NOT about military dominance, it's about economic and diplomatic influence, bloc politics and culture. Quite frankly, the fact you can conquer and absorb an entire foreign continent & culture in 1900 BC might make sense ... but not in 1900 AD, it feels hollow to me. Not to go off on a tangent, but Iraq today proves this IMO, and Vietnam before it (for both US and French).

Unfortunately I fear that, not only would this be very difficult to pull off (you would not only have to develop TWO really good games, and to boot figure out a reliable transition between them), I doubt it would make any economic sense for a gaming house to take on that kind of risk. It would truly have to be a labor of love (and financial stupidty I suppose)