What do you think it means

[Thormodr]

Not many successful suits would say "let's cater to this tiny niche of our market and ignore the other 95%", if MP starts growing towards 25/30% maybe we see more of that but at current levels I think it's really unlikely.

Companies have done dumber things catering to the extreme minority. Lol.

We shall see but I feel the future is grim.

 

[thecrazyscot]

Not many successful suits would say "let's cater to this tiny niche of our market and ignore the other 95%", if MP starts growing towards 25/30% maybe we see more of that but at current levels I think it's really unlikely.

I can absolutely see corporate seeing those big bucks in the multiplayer live service games and wanting to see if they can successfully grab a piece of it with Civ.

In my experience the suits up top often don't really understand their own product, and so them not seeing this would be a death sentence for Civ makes total sense.

 

[ThichN]

Wait, the CS took a city without razing it and they akso built a wonder? They can build wonders?

Yes, and it said in the notifications: "LOC_CITY_NAME_UNFOUND has constructed the Forbidden Palace." Or something similar. Haha.

Here is a screenshot. Again, Forbidden Palace was made after Capua was conquered by the city-state, not before. (Tilantongo is the original city-state.)

I wonder if Augustus had started work on the wonder when the city was captured?

 

[stealth_nsk]

Not many successful suits would say "let's cater to this tiny niche of our market and ignore the other 95%", if MP starts growing towards 25/30% maybe we see more of that but at current levels I think it's really unlikely.

Companies have done dumber things catering to the extreme minority. Lol.

We shall see but I feel the future is grim.

I can absolutely see corporate seeing those big bucks in the multiplayer live service games and wanting to see if they can successfully grab a piece of it with Civ.

In my experience the suits up top often don't really understand their own product, and so them not seeing this would be a death sentence for Civ makes total sense.

On one side we have company management with a lot of game development and distribution experience, who do a lot of marketing and similar research. On the other side we see some players, most of which don't have access to any relevant research and most of them have very little game development experience (I know we have some people who are in game dev here on this forum, but that's a minority). So, when I see the second group calling the first group's decisions as dumb, I'm a bit skeptical.

If 2K see an opportunity to grab multiplayer community for civilization games... there's a chance that they are right? For example, we (players) mostly considered Civilization as PC game, but now it's released on consoles and there were reports that in some regions PS alone outshines PC sales. Also, not so long ago Mark Zuckerberg said something about being really strong in Civilization multiplayer, which by itself is kind of marketing and it could indicate a niche for competitive multiplayer game with intellectual focus.

I'm not claiming 2K is right. I just think claiming the opposite is quite premature.

 

[Thormodr]

On one side we have company management with a lot of game development and distribution experience, who do a lot of marketing and similar research. On the other side we see some players, most of which don't have access to any relevant research and most of them have very little game development experience (I know we have some people who are in game dev here on this forum, but that's a minority). So, when I see the second group calling the first group's decisions as dumb, I'm a bit skeptical.

If 2K see an opportunity to grab multiplayer community for civilization games... there's a chance that they are right? For example, we (players) mostly considered Civilization as PC game, but now it's released on consoles and there were reports that in some regions PS alone outshines PC sales. Also, not so long ago Mark Zuckerberg said something about being really strong in Civilization multiplayer, which by itself is kind of marketing and it could indicate a niche for competitive multiplayer game with intellectual focus.

I'm not claiming 2K is right. I just think claiming the opposite is quite premature.

Well, we are going to find out.

 

[evonannoredars]

So what exactly is the stories and tales section for?

 

[King Flevance]

On one side we have company management with a lot of game development and distribution experience, who do a lot of marketing and similar research. On the other side we see some players, most of which don't have access to any relevant research and most of them have very little game development experience (I know we have some people who are in game dev here on this forum, but that's a minority). So, when I see the second group calling the first group's decisions as dumb, I'm a bit skeptical.

If 2K see an opportunity to grab multiplayer community for civilization games... there's a chance that they are right? For example, we (players) mostly considered Civilization as PC game, but now it's released on consoles and there were reports that in some regions PS alone outshines PC sales. Also, not so long ago Mark Zuckerberg said something about being really strong in Civilization multiplayer, which by itself is kind of marketing and it could indicate a niche for competitive multiplayer game with intellectual focus.

I'm not claiming 2K is right. I just think claiming the opposite is quite premature.

I don't know, they released a game that has had 1 broken feature after another but multiplayer works and the reviews are plummeting. I gotta say, I wouldn't count the franchise fans out just yet.

So what exactly is the stories and tales section for?

Kind of like Let's Plays but in forum version. The forum format allows for a bit more creativity with writing vs video let's plays. It isn't really about strategy or walkthroughs (though you could do that somehow) its just a playthrough that you "narrate" usually for just for entertainment purposes.

 

[Hellenism Salesman]

Even as someone who likes Civ VII I can absolutely understand why there's less stories being written for it. On a mechanical level there's a lot going on (three separate games of civ in one playthrough) and on a narrative level much of it is handed to you.

When I read the in-game narrative events, I am often pleased and contented but never left wanting to extend the story. That's not a fault of the writing, mind you- they do exactly what they set out to. They present self-contained moments that don't overly distract from the game at hand. The result is that players don't really need or want to weave them into their own narratives.

There's probably something to be said about the prevalence of in-game narrative detracting from the player's ability to conjure their own, but it remains to be seen how a hypothetical no-narrative-events version would impact things. It wouldn't please those of you who find the game's mechanics unnatural and jarring, that's for sure

 

[vorlon_mi]

I’m definitely getting the same age resets and crises around the same times every game, is there some way you found to avoid this? This is happening in my installation even if I try to role play and ignore victory conditions, and I don’t think this is happening due to mods. Any help is appreciated.

In my current game, I got the plague crisis for the first time. I had more trade routes that game. I've had more frequent instances of the "angry IP" crises, because I usually expand right up to, and beyond, my settlement cap. It seems to make a difference if I got the right number of relics or not; it seems to make a difference whether I built enough wonders or not; it seems to matter if I got the yields up high enough or didn't bring home enough treasure fleets.

I have a vague memory from one of the livestreams that the crisis is somewhat related to how you played the age that is ending.
So my hypothesis is that your gameplay has some common elements, game-to-game, triggering the same crisis multiple times.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

i've only gotten plague and sadness. i agree that it's probably because of how you played as I do a lot of TRs and get up near the settlement cap (though not much over).

 

[protocol7]

It would be nice if the game explained any of this so we knew

 

[tman2000]

I've seen a couple of people suggest this but it seems bizarre to me, MP is less than 5% of the user base as I understand it.

I am fed up with the game as is and barely tried out the new DLC. I'm also done with major modding because looking into the game files sort of depresses me. I might get a second wind and make a civ. I have a great Exploration Age England concept.

The game really needs two modes. An online mode that is more streamlined, and a vastly un-streamlined, expanded singleplayer mode. I'm convinced they need to lean Civ 3 with no settlement caps (on towns) for expansionist gameplay. It's the natural role for the streamlined systems and town/city concept.

Something happened with the UI late in development. It's just bad and embarrassing. I've seen the script code, and I've seen what is and what isn't inside the engine. It's a mess. There's not intent behind any of it. And the game is hyper balanced, like painfully, restrictively balanced, for game scenarios that are not that balance or that fun. It's bad, very bad news. They made this amazing 3-D model but don't even have a halfway good camera mode to post screenshots of your beautiful cities online, like basic salesmanship. You'd think greed would justify that.

It's just a mess. I honestly believe the Ayahuasca rumors. I think even other people (-cough- Bethesda?) have fallen under the same trap.

Let me clarify. I've worked in church organizations, the military, retail, in finance (Wall Street). There are always pockets where people hold power due to managerial position and how the bureaucratic administration is structured. Who abuse that power. Plainly, we can refer to things like the Secret Service scandal of a few years back where they were in Vegas wasting government money on "conferences" but actually renting out expensive suites. This kind of "post morality" management attracts turbo-narcissists who hold onto these "good deal" positions for dear life and form cliques around holding onto power. Going big really induces this. Skyrim being so big was the death of BGS. It just made too much money. Corporate began to expect that money and then some, the management in studio had too much money to throw around and not nearly enough pressure or passion on their part. Firaxis seems vulnerable to this.

I recall that as you go to Walmart, physical media is dying. Civilization V was sort of the last big PC game that sold abundantly at Walmart, only matched perhaps by GTA which is not exactly a "PC game". The Civ V expansion crew I think came in just as the environment made the money really hot.

Civ VII is one of the most underbaked, pathetic, not-quite-right games in this genre to ever release AND it's extremely expensive. There are good ideas in it, and it's beautiful. I particularly think the leader models' animation is a level of unrealized excellence, in spite of the hate. There is so much communicated in their body language. Someone showed up for the work. I don't think it was management.

So many of our hobbies and communities have been pared back by corporate, generational, and macroeconomic forces. And we complain and politics is invoked to protect corporations from our criticism. It's just really disappointing, disheartening, and sad that Civ of all franchises has now fallen sway to the times. No, I don't mean the "woke" times. I just mean the "everything economic bubble" generational values and morals shift times.

Firaxis was hiring a historian lately and I almost considered applying myself. Civ 7 has the absolutely pathetic barebones minimum narrative text. Yet I recall past Civ games, Creative Assembly Total War. Back then it was all hands on deck of devs reading history and contributing. It was passion. There shouldn't have to be a history "guy" on staff. It's sad. I mean, why read history when you can spend that Walmart Civ 5 money to go to Peru and smoke DMT then pay some nerd minimal bucks to then overwork him while discounting his opinion and then release a half-baked game as a result.?

 

[Kyriakos]

It would be nice if the game explained any of this so we knew

If the code for the crisis trigger defines a value of (say) some linear function, I don't think they would want you to know
Probably they wouldn't also if it is entirely artificial (made up example: if units move to a tile x tiles away from an intersection of y roads z times).
My suspicion is that it is (at best) a conjunction of those two cases, so if you knew you could prevent it.

 

[protocol7]

I have always played civ more like chess so having a strategic system I can influence but am intended not to understand the mechanics of feels wrong? Though I know many people play civ for all kinds of reasons so maybe this fits with sim style play more for example. Not everyone has to like the same things I like bit I wish that if I wanted I could find out.

 

[MutilationWave]

If the code for the crisis trigger defines a value of (say) some linear function, I don't think they would want you to know
Probably they wouldn't also if it is entirely artificial (made up example: if units move to a tile x tiles away from an intersection of y roads z times).
My suspicion is that it is (at best) a conjunction of those two cases, so if you knew you could prevent it.

All I have to go on is personal experience, but I had the barbarian uprising crisis my very first age transition and it's been happiness crisis every time since. I always go over settlement cap and rarely do war of conquest. I do some defensive wars that turn into a bit of conquest but sometimes I go an entire age without a war.