Were "stacks of doom" really that bad?

[Mathalamus]

i think its a crime not to make a modern looking 3D game any later than 2005. if civ6 has no 3D graphics at all, i would never pay a dime for it. 2d graphics are old, and very much obsolete. the only use it has left is its application in Strategic view or similar. it should never be a main part of the game.

however i understand that too much of it can be a bad thing. civ4's level of 3d graphics is perfect for civ. use that.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

The OP is a loaded question. Stacks =/= stacks of doom. Stacks are fine, stacks of doom are not.

I've said it in Civ4 forums, I will keep saying it here, the real problem is unit maintenance.

1UPT messes with tactical/strategic map scales and creates a hopeless AI problem for the company. In addition, it:

a) Congests the map with neutral units. Enemies with world-shattering armies cannot fight because... 3 workers are chilling out in the mountain pass?! Seriously?
b) Forces designers to raise hammer costs to insane levels, everyone just buys units.
c) Making units so cheap to maintain (3GPT per unit lategame means jack) that AI's will give you the carpet of doom anyway.

Both for realism and good gameplay, fighting men should be cheap to equip but very expensive to maintain and supply. 10 swordsman or 5 aircraft carriers should bankrupt nations.

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

no one will play a game that looks like to be made in 1998.

oh my god, so this is the sort of players civ5 aimed to get.

i never would believed if someone would have told me that we will seriosuly be discussing graphics here

well I have a surprise for you:

I hate civ5 graphics. it´s not well done and I hate the design

 

[Polish]

I must agree. I never thought we would be seriously discussing graphics here.

IMHO the graphics are nice, but mostly a distraction from the game. As a matter of fact, I would much rather have less intensive graphics that were easier to see and discriminate, especially when the screen is zoomed out. I would much rather have fewer individual figures even with less detail that my computer would have an easier (faster) time dealing with.

This is not a first person shooter or an RTS that we are talking about after all, so why try to look like one?

 

[Vicomt]

hehe, possibly the most deep game I've ever played is all completely rendered in ASCII (if you're a purist). If Civ had 1/10th the amount of depth Dwarf Fortress has, it'd be awesome beyond imagining.

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

hehe, possibly the most deep game I've ever played is all completely rendered in ASCII (if you're a purist). If Civ had 1/10th the amount of depth Dwarf Fortress has, it'd be awesome beyond imagining.

lol thanks for the tip, i will have to check that out, although i dont really like sandbox games and my head is shaking just by looking at the screenshots

 

[Brian Shanahan]

i think its a crime not to make a modern looking 3D game any later than 2005. if civ6 has no 3D graphics at all, i would never pay a dime for it. 2d graphics are old, and very much obsolete. the only use it has left is its application in Strategic view or similar. it should never be a main part of the game.

however i understand that too much of it can be a bad thing. civ4's level of 3d graphics is perfect for civ. use that.

So you believe that games that look like this are obsolete and should not be produced:

Spoiler :

And these are representative screenshots of the number 1 and 2 selling games in the UK PC market last year, with the current edition coming out top in all formats, selling nearly 700,000 copies in the four months since release we have figures for (Nov 2010-Feb 2011). Because by your reckoning the game is hopelessly out of date.

Edit: I rewrote the code in the skin slightly to give more of a contrast in the colours based on bad to top levels, only change made to the default.

 

[Mathalamus]

i cant tell if that's 2d or 3d. if you can make the 2d so nice you cant tell fi its actually 2d, then that's not obsolete and should be produced. such games seem rare to me.

 

[Nares]

Stacks were not ideal, but civ IV was fun.
1upt is a good idea, but civ V is less fun.

Indeed.

A tactical battle option a-la Master of Orion would have also been fun, but it's even more out of the question.

Hardly; having the tactical combat integrated into the strategic map is a tremendous improvement over utilizing a separate tactical overlay and a auto-resolve function.

I consider the implementation of 1upt to be the cause of "there isn't that much to do for most of the game".

I don't. Compare CiV's social policy system to CIV's civic system. It's immediately obvious that interactivity was designed out of this iteration, most likely to achieve their goals of making the game idiot-friendly. There isn't that much to do for most of the game because implementing things to do would confuse their target audience.

It's all about preventing "a unit on every single hex".

Their lack of any meaningful attempt at implementing a engaging unit maintenance system suggests to me that they weren't concerned in the slightest about "a unit on every single hex."

Cities have to be kept as useless as possible, and this is done with all kinds of means. Qualitatively, that means low tile yields, buildings that are expensive and of dubious value;

They increased city radius and decreased tile yields to de-emphasize the importance of city location as a function of tiles grabbed. This limits city placement min-maxing, and is further reinforced by mediocre improvement yields.

It is their attempt at either emphasizing their own city placement priorities (ie riverside, desertside, mountainside, etc), or more likely an attempt at making the game idiot-friendly.

All the contortions that the developers are making to obscure that fact is what slows the game down and makes it boring.

I'm pretty sure it comes across as slow and boring because that's what they were going for; a version of CiV for relative dimwits, and a continued exploration of how to better port the Civilization franchise to consoles and online-apps.

Wargamers will continue to love it, and builders/empire-management types will continue to bemoan the side effects of it.

There's no correlation between 1UPT and the total hatchet job they applied to the builder/empire-management aspects of the game.

There was no grand conspiracy to design the game around 1UPT. There was, however, a grand conspiracy to make the game less challenging. We know this; it was stated time and again both during development and after release.

What's new to the discussion is just how little importance Shafer placed on the AI, though his belief that the AI should present little more challenge than a speed-bump already spoke volumes.

1UPT messes with tactical/strategic map scales and creates a hopeless AI problem for the company.

See above; Shafer felt the AI wasn't worth investing time into. In his words, a good AI doesn't increase sales enough. In my words, he didn't belong as the lead designer of a flagship product with so much history.

a) Congests the map with neutral units. Enemies with world-shattering armies cannot fight because... 3 workers are chilling out in the mountain pass?! Seriously?

I'll give you that; they goofed hard on that, but neutral units are a minor issue.

b) Forces designers to raise hammer costs to insane levels, everyone just buys units.

Nonsense. Beyond which, the omnipresent option to gold rush was a terrible mistake.

c) Making units so cheap to maintain (3GPT per unit lategame means jack) that AI's will give you the carpet of doom anyway.

Likewise, that was Firaxis' mistake. Poor AI was intentional, and evidence of Shafer's lack of vision; poor unit maintenance system is an oversight, and evidence of Shafer's lack of talent.

Both for realism and good gameplay, fighting men should be cheap to equip but very expensive to maintain and supply. 10 swordsman or 5 aircraft carriers should bankrupt nations.

It shouldn't bankrupt nations, but serious limits on unit counts is vital to making a 1UPT system work when tactical combat is integrated into a strategic map.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Hardly; having the tactical combat integrated into the strategic map is a tremendous improvement over utilizing a separate tactical overlay and a auto-resolve function.

How? They've nerfed production, hurt improvement building, weakened combat options and created a permanent logistical nightmare, all to implement your "superior" system.

 

[Iranon]

A great many 3d games look terrible because there's something that can't be done well with the tools/budget at hand. Quality discrepancies in polygons vs. textures, characters vs. environment, static detail vs. animation quality etc can be very jarring. Someone is bound to bite off more than they can chew... or put so much effort into something cool they can do that the rest seems shoddy in comparison.
True good looks become apparent when technology has marched on and the game still looks fresh. In a way, Civ1 looks better than the last 2 iterations... Civ4 suffers from bland and dreary 3d terrain, especially clusters of hills look terrible. Civ5 looks a lot better, but also a little dead and empty. I'd have preferred detailed 2d to either.

Also, slick looks shouldn't get in the way of more important things. Sacrificing gameplay instead of eye candy when modern hardware reaches its limits is the canonical example, but certainly not the only one.
Since my favourite game was brought up already... Dwarf Fortress leaves your graphics card alone while it tortures your CPU... but it plays best with ANSI characters because those are most readable in a game that drowns you in information. They're also used beautifully whether it's for matching objects very well or effects like rain, ocean waves and showers of goblin limbs.

Gameplay first, carefully chosen aesthetics second, technical achievement a very distant third.

 

[MkLh]

A great many 3d games look terrible because there's something that can't be done well with the tools/budget at hand. Quality discrepancies in polygons vs. textures, characters vs. environment, static detail vs. animation quality etc can be very jarring. Someone is bound to bite off more than they can chew... or put so much effort into something cool they can do that the rest seems shoddy in comparison.
True good looks become apparent when technology has marched on and the game still looks fresh. In a way, Civ1 looks better than the last 2 iterations... Civ4 suffers from bland and dreary 3d terrain, especially clusters of hills look terrible. Civ5 looks a lot better, but also a little dead and empty. I'd have preferred detailed 2d to either.

Also, slick looks shouldn't get in the way of more important things. Sacrificing gameplay instead of eye candy when modern hardware reaches its limits is the canonical example, but certainly not the only one.
Since my favourite game was brought up already... Dwarf Fortress leaves your graphics card alone while it tortures your CPU... but it plays best with ANSI characters because those are most readable in a game that drowns you in information. They're also used beautifully whether it's for matching objects very well or effects like rain, ocean waves and showers of goblin limbs.

Gameplay first, carefully chosen aesthetics second, technical achievement a very distant third.

For a long time there were drawbacks in 3D - while it was more flexible, it was also a less precise and sometimes looked worse than 2D because of the low polygon number (Alone in the Dark 1 with its 5-polygon monsters wasn't really graphically better than 2D games at that time). These issues are however mostly gone and nowadays 3D is just better (albeit there is one genre where 2D backgrounds still hold their place - adventure games). It not only looks better but ability to zoom helps gameplay too. It would be really weird if Civ6 would be in 2D.

 

[Nares]

How? They've nerfed production, hurt improvement building, weakened combat options and created a permanent logistical nightmare, all to implement your "superior" system.

They re-balanced yields to de-emphasize city placement based on tile yields. Larger city radius with weaker yields makes cities more homogeneous, ie less specialized, ie less important to min-max their placement, ie less challenging to "properly" site, ie easier to site, ie friendlier to noobs.

The last bit is important because that was their singular stated design philosophy of "increasing accessibility."

The "permanent" logistical nightmare is an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a meaningful mechanic for limiting unit counts. Were they really trying to design and implement proper 1UPT tactical combat integrated into the Civ's strategic map, they would have implemented a meaningful and engaging unit count limit mechanic.

I'm unsure what you mean by "weakened combat options." That seems a subjective argument that cannot be supported or proven by argument.

As for tactical combat being integrated into the strategic map, it's superior to a tactical overlay with auto-resolve. Auto-resolve is always an inferior system. The tactical overlay itself adds extra functionality that needs to be programmed/tested, as well as the unavoidable load times.

Integrating tactical combat into the strategic map avoids those pitfalls. No loading, less programming, less testing, etc.

The current system works fine under certain unit count thresholds. AI aside, which is a whole separate issue that we know was tainted by Shafer's personal opinion that AI is a waste of development resources, a meaningful and engaging unit count limit mechanic would solve most 1UPT issues. Granted, such a mechanic would only come with an expansion, which may or may not come.

 

[Blitz66]

I stopped playing Civ 5 due to their implementation of 1UPT.

I'm not saying I prefer SoDs to 1UPT, but 1UPT in Civ 5 is bad.

In my opinion, the game would have been tremendously better if there were 10 to 20 times the amount of tiles on the board.

Traffic jams would no longer be an issue, cities themselves could grow to encompass more than 1 tile, and you could actually execute tactical maneuvers that don't require your calvary to cross an entire continent to flank an opponent. You also wouldn't have a navy that fills the entirety of the Mediterranean.

The tile size simply turns be off of this game, and I have not played it at all in the past 3-4 months.

 

[XeroK00L]

CIV5 has its SoD too. It's called (Stealth) Bombers. Fortunately Bombers only appear in the later part of the game. When you have enough (Stealth) Bombers nothing will stop you anymore. It's pretty boring at that point. So yeah 1UPT is the way to go. Even though traffic jams can sometimes be annoying it's still tons more fun than SoD.

 

[Pizzaspy]

To answer the original question, yes they were. They were terrible and 1UPT is a massive improvement.

 

[MkLh]

I stopped playing Civ 5 due to their implementation of 1UPT.

I'm not saying I prefer SoDs to 1UPT, but 1UPT in Civ 5 is bad.

In my opinion, the game would have been tremendously better if there were 10 to 20 times the amount of tiles on the board.

Even if we assume that a computer could run such super size maps, how long would it take to finish a game? 10 to 20 times longer than now?

 

[Mathalamus]

i would think its much higher. even without any 3d elements, its still going to use a lot of CPU powers just to run a map that size.

 

[Blitz66]

Even if we assume that a computer could run such super size maps, how long would it take to finish a game? 10 to 20 times longer than now?

Obviously the game would have been balanced around the increased tile number with increased movement ranges etc.

Any Hex based game I've ever played has offered a tremendously larger number of hex with which to maneuver with.

It is the fundamental reason this game fails in my opinion.

As far as performance; if a game can't offer good gameplay, the graphics and performance are irrelevant.

 

[Thormodr]

I like snazzy graphics as much as anyone but when they come at the expense of a good game then cIV quality graphics is good enough for me.

Firaxis and 2K Games emphasized the eye candy because the beauty of Civilization 5 is only skin deep.