What Video Games Have You Been Playing VII: The Real Ending is Locked Behind a Paywall

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I'm playing Don't Starve...I know it's an old game, but I have revisited it after many years of not touching it , as many of my titles in my Steam library...The game is simply awesome...
 
Or Mary Antoinette :mischief:

I should point out that Marie Antoinette was actually Austrian, being the daughter of Empress Maria Theresa.
 
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I'm playing Don't Starve...I know it's an old game, but I have revisited it after many years of not touching it , as many of my titles in my Steam library...The game is simply awesome...

Revisiting games is all I seem to do nowadays. There just isn't anything new out there that catches my attention anymore.
 
Of course not, but Catherine was still a significant French ruler.
 
Bah, another good thing about not having tried VI. Maybe someday when it's in the bargain bin. ;)
 
The Civ VI AI does not build units, as others have pointed out though this is better than Civ V's carpets of doom. However, the city states do build carpets of doom and never upgrade them. It's pretty dumb, they should bank more of their production as gold to make them juicier targets. Having archers in the end game is dumb as hell.
 
Played a Civ 4 game last weekend, Big and Small map with Massive Continents. This usually means one large continents with many islands, large and small, scattered over the map, with some civs starting on those islands. Anyway, I hit MT and had cuirassiers before anyone, but I shared a land border on the main continent with my 3 closest allies, and went for overseas expansion. I capitulated Roosevelt and Huayna Capac who were just getting out of the classical age (poor isolated start AIs, RIP) and had a large colonial overseas empire, which was fun, but my continent got gobbled up by one of my allies, Gandhi, who capitulated almost everyone else on it, and now he's far too strong for me to win a war against. The lesson: go for contiguous expansion when you have the opportunity, even if it means betraying allies.
 
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The list of issues I have with Civ VI is too long to post in this space. It's been out for, what, 18 months? And they haven't even addressed some basic problems. I don't normally pay close attention to game developers the way I do authors or film directors, but now I have to, so I don't buy another game made by these clowns.
 
The list of issues I have with Civ VI is too long to post in this space. It's been out for, what, 18 months? And they haven't even addressed some basic problems. I don't normally pay close attention to game developers the way I do authors or film directors, but now I have to, so I don't buy another game made by these clowns.
What are some of your issues?
 
What are some of your issues?
The three 'umbrella' problems are the AI, the UI, and the second half of the game.

The AI is so poor at maneuvering its units and selecting targets that fighting a war against it is essentially an exploit, even at Emperor difficulty. For instance, a melee unit safely inside a city will not attack enemy units in adjacent hexes.

Just thought of another example: The AI can have one of your cities completely surrounded and at its mercy, and won't take it. I was once caught completely with my pants down, just because I was a doofus, and I still completely schooled my attacker. Defeated his invasion, destroyed his army and went on to wipe him from the game, all after being completely over a barrel. Enemy units make incomprehensible decisions that amount to throwing the game.

The UI: Just as an example, when another Civ offers you a Luxury in a trade deal, you can't see whether you already have that Luxury before deciding to accept or reject the offer.

Oh, another one: The UI automatically selects the next available unit that needs orders (this part is fine, desirable even, because I cannot possibly remember to manually examine every unit every turn). Then, in a split second, it skips to the next one. If you're quick, you will give the selected unit an order just in time for it to skip to the next unit, which will then execute the order you intended for the previous unit. After you give a unit an order, you have to pause and let the UI settle down.

The second half of the game: Before the recent expansion, I hadn't finished a game in a year. It becomes incredibly static, once the player gets into a position to win, you just have to press Enter until you formally complete your victory condition. The AI does absolutely nothing. The obvious solution, to play at a harder difficulty setting, doesn't change anything, it only pushes back the moment when the game essentially stops. The higher difficulty settings also warp the game in some ways I don't like, because their implementation of 'difficulty' is to give the AI Civs bonuses; it's the strategy-game version of an RPG or a FPS just giving your enemies more armor or Hit Points. They're not actually harder to defeat, it just takes longer and is more tedious (ever do a "boss fight" in World of Warcraft? I wanted to claw my own eyes out).

There's a little bit of fun to be had if you can reconfigure your mind to play Civ VI as a kind of sandbox, builder game, where challenge isn't meant to be a part of it. Even then, it stumbles in a number of ways.

And just from a personal taste perspective, I don't like the way they've chosen to represent most of the things they're modeling. Religion, culture, scientific research, politics, trade, growth, warfare, geography - you name it, their take on it is bizarre (to me).
 
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The UI is very frustrating, I have that exact same issue with it.

To be fair, the difficulty thing has always been the way Civ handles this if I'm not mistaken but yes, it's dumb.

I actually find myself the target of late-game DoW's if I'm getting reasonably close to winning. It's almost always 2+ AI's that gang up on me and usually they are ones that I get along with great.

One thing I do like is they seemed to have dialed back the warmonger penalties a great deal but it's still frustrating to get DoW'd by multiple AI's, engage in intense warfare, come out victorious and still have everyone hate you like you are the bad guy in this situation.
 
To be fair, the difficulty thing has always been the way Civ handles this if I'm not mistaken but yes, it's dumb.

Yeah. It's kind of hard to code an AI to be "better" at a game like Civ. Though I have read that in the past, good AIs for strategy games have been coded by observing the strategies that multiplayer metagame centralizes around, then coding the AI to execute some of these strategies.
 
The UI is very frustrating, I have that exact same issue with it.

To be fair, the difficulty thing has always been the way Civ handles this if I'm not mistaken but yes, it's dumb.
It is an old thing, yes. I pretty much settled on Emperor difficulty, as a kind of balance point, in every iteration of the game.

One thing I do like is they seemed to have dialed back the warmonger penalties a great deal but it's still frustrating to get DoW'd by multiple AI's, engage in intense warfare, come out victorious and still have everyone hate you like you are the bad guy in this situation.
Warmonger penalties have never bothered me the way they do other people. imo, some kind of "you're getting too powerful" penalty would make more sense, and could be applied to things besides capturing cities, such as number of technologies researched or number of cities converted to your religion. This way, taking an enemy city actually wouldn't be a big deal if it's not a great city.

Yeah. It's kind of hard to code an AI to be "better" at a game like Civ. Though I have read that in the past, good AIs for strategy games have been coded by observing the strategies that multiplayer metagame centralizes around, then coding the AI to execute some of these strategies.
The errors the AI makes are really elementary. I've heard that the AI doesn't ever build air units, for instance. I've only played one game to completion in the last 15 months or so, right after the expansion came out, and I don't remember seeing any enemy air forces, but that was just one game.
 
At least in IV the bonus at the higher level usually translated into the AI teching better and bigger SOD's which while not perfect was easier to program them to use.
And they never showed up at your gates and didn't attack. hahhahaha. unless they determined that you were really to tough and then sometimes even then. And for those that get a little bored with IV just do the R&R mod for colonization. It will entertain you for a bit. And you still get the IV UI feel, which was really a good UI
 
The errors the AI makes are really elementary. I've heard that the AI doesn't ever build air units, for instance. I've only played one game to completion in the last 15 months or so, right after the expansion came out, and I don't remember seeing any enemy air forces, but that was just one game.

It seems like most of the problems you are describing applied to Civ 5. At least, I thought the Civ 5 UI was a step down from Civ 4's, the AI was not able to fight wars effectively (not because it didn't build units, although iirc that was something of a problem in earlier versions of the game, before patching and expansions), and Civ 5's lategame is a lot of hitting "end turn" to get to a victory condition. The epxansions for Civ 5 did help the lategame problem a little bit but not enough to hold my interest in the game, ultimately.

Anyway, I didn't buy 6 because of all these problems I had with 5 and from what people are saying about 6 I think I made the right choice, for myself at least. Others have different preferences and that's fine. Though naturally I wish more people shared my preferences as then more games that I like would be made! :)

And they never showed up at your gates and didn't attack.

I've had it happen sometimes. They will opportunistically target a city, then when I reinforce that city, occasionally they will seem unable to pick a new target and just sort of stand around until I finish them off.
 
Yeah that could happen if it was low "brave" AI. It decided the odds were not good enough in it's favor. Monty usually didn't have that issues as he'd throw a stack of his UU against Axes fortified in Hill cities only to see them go down in flames. :lol:
 
I find that Civ IV still gives me that "One more turn" feeling.

With Civ V and VI it's more like "Do I have to?"
 
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Yeah that could happen if it was low "brave" AI. It decided the odds were not good enough in it's favor. Monty usually didn't have that issues as he'd throw a stack of his UU against Axes fortified in Hill cities only to see them go down in flames. :lol:

One Civ 4 turn I'll never forget is Monty throwing Jaguar Warriors and Chariots against a couple of my Machine Gunners for almost wo minutes. I'm glad that's over.
 
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