What were they doing anyway?

[Zinegata]

Wow. The apologists have really poured it on since my last post! Lots of interesting stuff to dismantle afterwards! =)

However, I'm in the office right now so I can't comment a lot. However, I noticed that Sulla had decided to grace the thread with his insights, and given that I have a high opinion of the guy (his wonderful Walkthrough has given me impetus to give Civ IV a chance), I'll tackle his points first =).

This is an absurd argument to make.

Not at all. I am merely pointing out simple facts. Note that I am not even the first person to point out these facts. Just see the "Disenchanted" thread in Apolyton started by Vel.

Say what you will about Civ3, many people didn't like it - but the AI was greatly improved over Civ2, and not simply because the rules of the game were rewritten.

And let me make it clear that it is the latter that I dispute. The Civ III A.I. was more challenging, there is no argument of that here. However, I contend it was only achieved because Soren altered the rules of the game, and in doing so deprived the game of most, if not all, of its strateguy.

The Civ3 AI expands very quickly, unlike the Civ2 AI.

This was simply because the Civ 2 A.I. had an expansion cap - it was meant to stop expanding after a certain number of cities had been founded. Remove the cap, and the A.I. would have grown like weeds on its own, to the level of expansion seen in Civ 3. Same algorithm, same A.I., but different results because the rules governing the A.I. were changed.

A true A.I. improvement would have been efficient expansion. The Civ III A.I., with its penchant for just placing cities in even the worst of locations, is still a long way from achieving this milestone.

It's also extremely aggressive (too much so, in fact) and prone to declare war.

And so was the Civ II A.I., and so was the SMAC A.I.. It's not at all uncommon to see the human player at war with all of the A.I. factions (especially at higher difficulty levels). This is nothing new.

A real improvement would have been an improvement of the A.I.'s diplomatic capabilities. The Civ IV system, to Soren's credit, begins to show this kind of improvement. The Civ III A.I. however, with all of the diplomatic loopholes players used on it, was not an improvement. It was just the old A.I. in new clothing.

It does upgrade its units,

It does upgrade its units, but not all of its units. Obsolete units still proliferate the Civ III battlefield, and some ancient units even find themselves still in employment in the modern era by some players! (i.e. Jaguar Warriors)

However, given the new combat rules, which weakened modern units considerably, those un-upgraded units became a viable combat force even in the modern age. This rule was thus a rule to protect the A.I., as it was expected that humans, who regularly upgraded nearly all of their units, would have technologically superior armies.

forms large stacks, and can pose a serious threat to even the best of players on the higher difficulties.

And actually, the Civ 2 A.I. formed larged stacks too. So did the SMAC A.I.. However, we don't remember them as threats, we remember them as an opportunity to wipe out half a dozen units in one blow. Remember: in Civilization 2 and SMAC, stacking was a dumb thing to do because defeating just the top defender resulted in the destruction of the entire stack.

The Civ III A.I. is thus in no way smarter or better. It just got bailed out by the fact that stacks can no longer be wiped out in one blow due to a rules change. An attacker now had to wipe out each and every unit in a stack to wipe out the said stack. Is it more challenging? Yes. Does this represent an improvement in the A.I.? No. It's just the same A.I.

A true improvement in the military A.I. is if it can perform something even slightly more complex than the old "send every unit against the nearest city" algorithm. But can the A.I. do even a simple feint in Civ III? Not at all.

Any good player can easily out-expand the AI in Civ2 Deity and jump into first place that way (although they may not be able to sustain that position).

And again, because this is only because of the expansion cap. The A.I. was artificially constrained by the programmers to make more cities (for what reason I don't know, but probably so as to not overburden the computer with overly long turns - hey, isn't that a problem with Civ III?!). Take it away, and you have the Civ III expand-like mad A.I.

Oh, and as you say, you're right that a player may not be able to sustain that position. However, as you've not mentioned the reason, I'll say it out loud: It's because the A.I. is extremely aggressive, and is prone to making war on the player. Now, isn't that exactly the same behaviour you yourself described of the Civ III A.I.?

I think you're remember Civ2 through rose colored glasses.

Not at all. I am making pointed observations on the observed behaviour of the A.I.. And as I've shown, the Civ II and Civ III A.I. practically exhibit the same behaviour (indicating they merely reused existing algorithms). I have also pointed out specific rules changes that have made the A.I., though using the same behaviour, more competetive.

Thus, the point stands: The Civ III A.I. is essentially the same as the Civ II A.I.. It only became more challenging because of rules changes (and NOT A.I. improvements). Moreover, those said rules changes have the unfortunate effect of taking much of the strategy out of a strategy game.

That game has many strengths, but the AI in that game is NOT one of them.

And I have never said the Civ II A.I. was superior, nor that the Civ II A.I. posed a great challenge. I am merely pointing out that the behaviour of the Civ II and Civ III A.I. is the same.

Soren's AI is even better in Civ4, although you probably won't see it since you're more interested in complaining about technical issues.

Seeing as I cannot even run the game to make a judgement thanks to the said technical issues, I find it strange that you criticize me beforehand for complaining about technical issues. Hopefully, yours is not the voice of Firaxis, for such comments can only be considered inconsiderate.

*shrug* But then again, people are always inconsiderate to other's plights anyway, as it's always one of our curses. I try not to be inconsiderate for I always remember the words: "When they came and took the Jews I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. When they came and took the gypsies I did not speak out because I was not a gypsy. So when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me."

Of course, the above quote comes from an extreme time and inspired by an extreme act of cruelty (hopefully none here take offense), but it's the thought and lesson behind that quotation that counts.

You're welcome to your own opinions, but I find your arguments about Civ3 less persuasive considering you mention that you boycotted the game.

And how is that? If your assumption is that I never played the game, you are mistaken. I borrowed a copy of the game and played it for quite a few weeks. After it, I was glad I just borrowed it and decided to boycott buying Civ III or any of its related products.

Boycotting something doesn't mean that you never tried it. Nonetheless, the boycott was for subjective reasons anyway - I did not like playing strategy games with no strategy. And as I've shown, it's useless, for the most part, to debate subjective topics. If playing a strategy game with little strategy is your cup of tea, it's your cup of tea.

On the other hand, if you're implying I have a bias against the game, then I remind you again that bias is a subjective matter and not an objective one. The objective deals in truths. The subjective deals in opinions. Besides, given that you have a relationship with Soren, one could make an equal claim that anything you say will be biased to support Soren, but again this is entirely subjective and let's not get into these kinds of silly arguments.

The subject matter to be discussed is the objective point that the Civilization A.I.'s "improvements" were brought about by rules changes that compromised the strategic options of the game. If you can name further specific instances of A.I. improvements, please do so and let's see what the truth reveals.

 

[Dairuka]

Civ 4 needs more beer and women.

Catherine is nice, but she keeps slapping me when I suggest trading Music for Sex.

I guess she doesn't like Barry White.

 

[Sorceresss]

I really dislike taking part in these silly debate

I resent your contemptuous qualification of our forum's debate as "silly".

 

[Dairuka]

I do not care who (you think) you are...but I resent your contemptuous qualification of our forum's debate as "silly".

If they are so "silly", Sullla, why don't you spend your expert time composing another eminent walkthrough, for the education of us silly forum-posters?

These arguements are silly.

It hasn't been a debate since the first page.

 

[Zinegata]

These arguements are silly.

It hasn't been a debate since the first page.

Oh, I don't think so. I think Psyringe and I made a good run with a debate that some people enjoyed =). I personally enjoy these rows myself because they let me hone various skills =).

Of course, there will always be a slew of posts that do not contribute much, but as a friend of mine likes to quote, the wise cannot be insulted, for the truth does not insult and the rest are not worth listening to.
And with that, I retreat back to office work...

 

[Sorceresss]

These arguements are silly. It hasn't been a debate since the first page.

Such arrogant contempt...You are now on my "ignore" list : if you are so negative, you are not worth any nano-second of my eye-time. Adieu.

 

[EdCase]

Civ 4 needs more beer and women.

Catherine is nice, but she keeps slapping me when I suggest trading Music for Sex.

I guess she doesn't like Barry White.

This is the most worthwhile comment in the whole thread. Refreshing,short.entirely devoid of posturing.

 

[Psyringe]

@Zinegata: As I see, this thread has outgrown our little discussion ... I just step by for some last remarks. We both made our points of view clear and there's not much left to do except agreeing to disagree in that matter. If we'd go on, we'd probably just repeat ourselves anyways.

My Civ 2 ran fine out of the box, as well as SMAC. I've never encountered anyone who was able to run either game out of the box either.

From my personal experience, Civ2 and SMAC ran stable, yes. (CivNet didn't at all, but that's another story.) But both had many bugs to be fixed, many of which were showstoppers - and they have been fixed.

And Civ 2 and SMAC were both written by excellent coders by my estimation. They got the game to run on Pentium Is with only 8 MB of RAM, and without massive slowdowns.

(Side note: I actually had massive slowdowns in SMAC in the unit designer, when scrolling one-by-one through the designs. That was so slow that I sometimes deliberately deleted useful designs just to speed the scrolling up. I always wondered whether this couldn't have been done more efficiently. But agree that as a whole, SMAC ran stable and sufficiently fast.)

With "brilliant designers, but no coding wizards" I didn't mean that they didn't know their job. I meant that the strength of their games was clearly the design, not the coding "tricks". It's not like in, say, Doom, where coding contributed a lot more to the game (specifically: Highly efficient 3d routines). Or like in Elite, with Bell & Braben squeezing 2048 diverse planets into 48 *kilo*bytes of memory (minus the space that the 3d engine and the rest of the game already took up) by clever use of seeding techniques. The equivalent in SMAC or Civ2 would have been an outstandingly good AI, using innovative and unique coding techniques. But neither game has that. Sullla has already summed up some of the shortcomings of the Civ2 and SMAC AI, so I don't need to repeat them here.

I've never been a fan of Soren Johnson, and I have to say bluntly that his A.I. improvements (and I do know something of the subject, objectively) is a joke.

I disagree. In my experence, the Civ3 AI was the first AI of the series (including SMAC) which could handle rapid expansion, which coordinated the actions of its military units in a sensible fashion (SMAC was advertised to do that, but I rarely saw it), and which could effectively counterattack in a war.

The Civ3 AI still left lots to be desired. Many players (including myself) thought that it cheated just too blatantly when it placed a city on a spot where centuries later a resource would appear. It still couldn't do landfalls efficiently (Pathfinding igeneral still had issues). And it relied massively on an inter-AI tech trading bonus (taking that away absolutely crippled the AI even on the highest difficulty levels). But imho it was a vast improvement over the AIs of previous games.

I also think that *some* of the criticism that the Civ3 AI received was based on nostalgia and glorifying the AIs of the previous games. For example, the Civ3 AI has been heavily criticized for being able to see the whole map. I don't remember anyone bringing this up for SMAC or Civ2 - it simply wasn't a topic. The AI wasn't very competitive anyways, so nobody cared whether it knew the map or not.

However, I have become increasingy careful in judging a game's AI. The AI is a strategy game's crown jewel, and usually there's some kind of mystery and hype around it. Which, when it is partially lifted, usually reveals that the AI isn't that great as claimed or previously thought. The Civ3 AI was crippled when it couldn't trade tech among each other at a discount. The GalCiv AI, which was the game's main selling point because it was supposed to be non-cheating, knew the map at game start (and cleverly explaining this fact with the background story didn't make it less cheating). Where are the great innovations? Where is the game that truly brings a "next generation" of strategy game AIs? It's a little sad that during the last dozen years, the biggest step for making AIs more competitive in strategy games was to constrain the player's time for decision making (i.e., switch to RTS).

But despite my general skepticism towards AI (and especially AI hype), I think that Soren substantially improved the AI of the Civ series. The Civ4 AI looks promising in many respects (it can actually do landfalls, for example) - however, the jury on the Civ4 AI is still out imho.

I really hope that Civ4 can be made to run on your computer, so that you can study its AI. I'd like to discuss it with you.

Edit: Reading your reply to Sullla, I underline the paragraph above. Talking about the AIs of Civ2 and Civ3 is interesting, but has the problem that I haven't played Civ2 for a *very* long time, and that you didn't fully explore the AI of Civ3. (I know that you played it, but some of your arguments sound as if you played the unpatched base game, but not the expansions. The Jaguar warriors appearing in modern times, for example, was a common appearance with the release version, because unique units weren't part of any upgrade path until a patch changed that.) So I really encourage you to get Civ4 and analyze its AI with us.

 

[MarkC1]

Hi, seeing as this is kinda what I do for a living I will try to clear it up a little bit.

First off you have every right to be
Things that you buy you expect them to work, and so it should.

But consider this the XBox 360 is having problems now too.
Have you ever had a car that needed new tires after purchase?
some food from a can that was off before you opened it?
A cell phone which makes radio's goes fuzzy?
the list can go on

Point blank technology today is so complex. As an example my home computer had over 10 million transistors (yes/no 0/1 circuits) working together.

Now to expect someone to create something that can interface with all these possible different combinations is crazy. There is no way the developers could have tested the game on all of these different machines.

Not to mention all the economics involved in delaying the release of a product for a week or even a month (time it took for the patch to come out)

So point and case the fact that there is now a patch out in under a month is phenominal.

My final though on all of this is
-- you get a oil change on car you use everyday approximately every three months

-- If you use your computer everyday does it get service that often?

so many different machines eh?

first off, theres two cpu companies: amd, intel
secondly, two video card companies: nvidia, ati

everyone is running windows XP

it wouldnt be THAT hard to test many of the configs

 

[DemonDeLuxe]

@Machete Phil

I accept everything you say since you are he who holds the Philosopher's stone. You alone have the power to define what *I* have to be content with, you created IT standards and behaviours and you have an expertise on the topic that is simply awe-inspiring. Your deep understanding of how a market works and how it should work, of medical engineering, of customer rights and customer protection laws and, basically, of everything else makes me tremble by the very thought that indeed you shed your enlightenment to me pitiful servant.

I declare hereby that you have every right to demand hard facts from anybody bold enough to have an own opinion differing from yours, which is actually the only sacrosanct one that is proof of itself and indisputable. Thinking about it, I seem to actually remember your wise words on some hebrew stone sheets, bearing a large number "11" in front of them. Forgive my doubts, o Master, I was tempted by evil, which is everything that differs from your illuminations. I am utterly convinced that anything that flows from your lips can be nothing but truth and wisdom, and if it should in any way seem to contradict what we see as reality, this is a simple flaw in the perception of some billion people simply not as perfect and omniscient as you are.

Father, forgive me... I... am a worm...

 

[Zinegata]

Well, it was nice sparring with you Psyringe, here are my closing points as well.

From my personal experience, Civ2 and SMAC ran stable, yes. (CivNet didn't at all, but that's another story.) But both had many bugs to be fixed, many of which were showstoppers - and they have been fixed.

Sorry if I'm poorly informed, but there were many showstopper bugs in Civ 2? I am aware of a number of such bugs in SMAC, but none in Civ 2. I never had the game crash once without a single patch in nearly a decade of playing.

The only game-breaking bug I can recall in Civ 2 is that the game wouldn't install in a PC without a sound card, and I'm not really sure how big an issue that was, but yes there were some issues.

With "brilliant designers, but no coding wizards" I didn't mean that they didn't know their job. I meant that the strength of their games was clearly the design, not the coding "tricks". It's not like in, say, Doom, where coding contributed a lot more to the game (specifically: Highly efficient 3d routines). Or like in Elite, with Bell & Braben squeezing 2048 diverse planets into 48 *kilo*bytes of memory (minus the space that the 3d engine and the rest of the game already took up) by clever use of seeding techniques.

Exactly. My point is that coding, except perhaps for Civ 2 and SMAC, is not Firaxis' forte. SMAC and Civ 2, in my estimation, were fairly sound technical achievements given that they could run on so little computing power, compared to Civ III and IV.

Thus, Firaxis ought to get better coders for their next release =). It is in their best interest. Note also that game design is independent of coding. Getting better coders will not result in limiting the design. In fact, getting better coders lets you run more complex designs in less powerful machines!

The equivalent in SMAC or Civ2 would have been an outstandingly good AI, using innovative and unique coding techniques. But neither game has that. Sullla has already summed up some of the shortcomings of the Civ2 and SMAC AI, so I don't need to repeat them here.

I've never said that the A.I. of Civ 2 or SMAC was stellar however. What Civ 2 and SMAC were great at was the immense suite of tools and options available for empire-building. You can go all-army with Yang, or tech like mad with Zakharov. The number of strategic options in SMAC was particularly impressive.

Note though, that it depends on the person whether or not they enjoy that sort of game. I personally like having lots of strategic options and an immense suite of tools. Others don't. It's a subjective matter.

I disagree. In my experence, the Civ3 AI was the first AI of the series (including SMAC) which could handle rapid expansion,

See above comment to Sulla on the "expansion cap" =). It made the A.I. more challenging, but it wasn't really "smarter". (and I have a feeling I'll be discussing this with Sulla next!)

which coordinated the actions of its military units in a sensible fashion (SMAC was advertised to do that, but I rarely saw it), and which could effectively counterattack in a war.

See above comment to Sulla on the "stacking rules" as well =). The military A.I. behaviour of Civ III was actually the same A.I. behaviour of Civ II, except it was now more effective thanks to rules changes =).

I also think that *some* of the criticism that the Civ3 AI received was based on nostalgia and glorifying the AIs of the previous games. For example, the Civ3 AI has been heavily criticized for being able to see the whole map. I don't remember anyone bringing this up for SMAC or Civ2 - it simply wasn't a topic. The AI wasn't very competitive anyways, so nobody cared whether it knew the map or not.

I actually reject those criticisms as well. I firmly believe that the A.I. should be allowed to cheat and to bend the rules. Its main purpose is to provide a greater challenge to the player. Its main purpose is not to become "smarter" or "better". If letting the A.I. see the whole map makes it more of a challenge, then it's a legal tool to use. I would only caution designers, however, to at least maintain the illusion of fairness. Some people (subjectively) just don't like playing in a game where unfairness exists, so the better a designer can mask the cheats of the A.I., the better the game will sell.

And before people scream "hypocrite", let me clarify: Soren is generally being lauded for producing a "better" A.I.. I dispute this and my contention is that Soren created more cheats and rules changes for the A.I., instead of actual improvements. There is a stark difference between making the A.I. play a game better and changing the rules so that the A.I. can win more =).

What I (subjectively) do NOT like is Soren's removal of many of the strategic options available in SMAC and Civ 2, mainly to hide the shortcomings of the existing A.I.. As I said, the move has taken much of the "strategy" out of a strategy game, and that's simply not my cup of tea.

However, I have become increasingy careful in judging a game's AI. The AI is a strategy game's crown jewel, and usually there's some kind of mystery and hype around it. Which, when it is partially lifted, usually reveals that the AI isn't that great as claimed or previously thought. The Civ3 AI was crippled when it couldn't trade tech among each other at a discount. The GalCiv AI, which was the game's main selling point because it was supposed to be non-cheating, knew the map at game start (and cleverly explaining this fact with the background story didn't make it less cheating).

Hence the need to maintain the illusion of fairness =). One of the ways of maintaining the said illusion is to not say what cheats the A.I. gets =).

Where are the great innovations? Where is the game that truly brings a "next generation" of strategy game AIs? It's a little sad that during the last dozen years, the biggest step for making AIs more competitive in strategy games was to constrain the player's time for decision making (i.e., switch to RTS).

The problem with A.I. is that it is a hit or miss affair. A lot of time and effort could be spent on an A.I. engine that turns out to be unable to compete with a player. The preference is thus to stick to A.I. engines and algorithms that already work and to just modify them slightly (or modify the rules) to make the A.I. more competetive.

There's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong, however, is to laud someone as improving the A.I. when he in effect has not. The praise "improved the A.I." should be reserved to someone who achieves the things Psyringe is asking for. It's not something to a title to be given to Soren or the current Firaxis dev team. They deserve credit for making a challenging A.I., but not a greatly improved one.

Oh, and to add to that last comment, I think Soren may deserve credit in civ IV for creating a challenging A.I. without, unlike Civ III, removing most of the strategy from a strategy game. I'll echo Vel's review in Apolyton and say that I really like how many strategic options the game has reintroduced, particularly in the civic arena.

But despite my general skepticism towards AI (and especially AI hype), I think that Soren substantially improved the AI of the Civ series. The Civ4 AI looks promising in many respects (it can actually do landfalls, for example) - however, the jury on the Civ4 AI is still out imho.

I really hope that Civ4 can be made to run on your computer, so that you can study its AI. I'd like to discuss it with you.

I think I can get it to run with a bit more RAM, at which point I'll be trying to observe to Civ IV A.I. while enjoying the game =).

Of course, I may not have as much time to post if I can play the game, since I'll likely be playing so much =).

Edit: Reading your reply to Sullla, I underline the paragraph above. Talking about the AIs of Civ2 and Civ3 is interesting, but has the problem that I haven't played Civ2 for a *very* long time, and that you didn't fully explore the AI of Civ3.

That is a fair thing to point out. I spent more time playing Civ 2 than playing Civ 3. However, it does not automatically mean that I did not manage to fully explore the Civ 3 A.I.. For example, if two people are trying to recognize what model a particular car is, the one with more experience with automobiles will probably arrive to the correct conclusion first (the other person, who may have no experiences with autos, could possibly never get it right). Likewise, as I do know quite a bit about A.I., scripting, and algorithms, I believe that my observations were sufficient to come to a meaningful conclusion.

(I know that you played it, but some of your arguments sound as if you played the unpatched base game, but not the expansions. The Jaguar warriors appearing in modern times, for example, was a common appearance with the release version, because unique units weren't part of any upgrade path until a patch changed that.)

And I go back to the main point in our debate - it is best to release a game that needs little to no patching =). I certainly wasn't about to buy another game since I had failed to enjoy the original version =).

Oh, and as for the Jaguar Warriors, with their cheap price and 2 movement points, I would have kept them in their state even if I was allowed to upgrade them! =).

So I really encourage you to get Civ4 and analyze its AI with us.

I will, once I get the thing to run on my comp....

 

[Dairuka]

Such arrogant contempt...You are now on my "ignore" list : if you are so negative, you are not worth any nano-second of my eye-time. Adieu.

I'm sure I'll lament the lack of spiteful replies coming from you later on in life. Though I am tempted to refer to a black pot, and a black kettle, I fail to bother, since I'm then reminded that it doesn't matter if you're black or white... or something like that.

I think Michael Jackson sings that song. It wasn't very good though. Now thriller was a good Michael Jackson song. I want to learn how to do that thriller dance someday...

 

[Roach]

Such arrogant contempt...You are now on my "ignore" list : if you are so negative, you are not worth any nano-second of my eye-time. Adieu.

Yeah, I have done the same thing. It's a shame that someone with so many posts can only contribute babble to a series of thoughtful posts. Perhaps that's how she racks them up. If I had a working copy and enjoyed the game I would be playing it.

In the main, I share the disappointment at the standard of release & patch for this game. A large part of my disappointment is due to the high expectations I had for this game. I can play small worlds with minimal CTDs but nothing more. The game seems to be pretty good but I am unable to enjoy it as much as I should given I keep expecting it to crash and I cant experience a larger portion of it.

I think that these problems will be sorted out in the future but never again will I take it on faith that a Fireaxis/T2 Game will work out of the box (no pre-order). Next time my trust will have to be earnt by visiting Forums such as this to see if it is worth the hassle.

Civ 4 not working is not the end of the world, it just seems like it.

Nevermind Oblivion and Gal Civ 2 are out soon, do I pre order?

 

[EoE]

Luckily CoD2 and BF2 can be played straight out of the box, and I suspect the same is true for my next purchase: GP Legends.

That's pretty hilarious.

I bought Civilization IV and it runs like an absolute dream on my machine.

Battlefield 2? Locks up my entire system (requiring a HARD reboot). The most recent patch offered by EA doesn't resolve this problem. It's also a known issue that was noted during beat before the game was released and affects all users of a particularly popular chain of motherboards...


Perfect evidence that different hardware = different experience. Everyone arguging for Firaxis' incompetence in this thread is drawing so largely from your own experience, it's laughably egocentric.


Show me any kind of hard data on the number of customers experiencing these problems vs. those who have purchased the product and we'll have a serious conversation. Until then it's nothing but vacuuous, pointless moaning and complaining.

Thanks for playing.

You might think it's laughable, but please explain one thing to me: Exactly how do I go about posting about the experiences of others? Do I dissect their brain? Or try reading their minds? Is that even legal? And what would the point be?

If you think giving feedback about bugs in a piece of software is pointless moaning, well then so be it. Personally I think it' illogical, since I guess we are all interested in the same thing: A game where small and large bugs have been ironed out.

I really don't understand why you get so worked up about it.

rgds/EoE

 

[BaneBlade]

Civ 4 needs more beer and women.

Catherine is nice, but she keeps slapping me when I suggest trading Music for Sex. I guess she doesn't like Barry White.

This is the most worthwhile comment in the whole thread. Refreshing,short.entirely devoid of posturing.

And I thought i was getting too horny, trying to have sex with my Ex-GF.... Nice to see i yet have to hit the bottom!
As to the topic, maybe various posters here should switch gears to make this whole discussion more enjoyable. If i want to be lectured on logic and argumentation i can talk to my crazy philosopy-studiing friends, or read a good book about it.
It's indeed kinda hard to make factual statements when we're indeed missing every basic fact in this case, but as the commitment and emotional involvement here shows it's an important matter for some of us. I thought it would benefit our round here when we could take a step back to a broader perspective, more like "Why do we soft/hardware-customers have to suffer such ****, whereas we could get back our money/ or a part of it with every other product so faulty?"

 

[haard]

Just a quick note on software development, testing and bugs.

I work daily with a lot more mission critical software than a game, most often designed to run on a very limited number of platforms, communicating only over standardized interfaces. Those products are not bug-free. They get extensively tested over several iterations, some of them use test-driven development, but bugs still ship to customer. Some bugs come from programmer errors, some from design errors, and a whole lot comes from hardware not quite living up to a standard, or flaws in 3pp libraries or tools used.

Now this is not a cause of 'rush-to-market'. Every single trouble report from a customer starts at $5000, and most often ends at far over $15000.

This situation is not optimal, and there are attempts to change the state of the industry, but it IS the way things are today, and the state of software engineering. Not good, but the way it is. Getting better, but slowly.

Now, if cIV did not run on my rig, I'd return it, wait for a patch or three, and lend or hire a copy before I buy. It's just a game after all. When I was younger (not that I'm THAT old), I'd try as hell to make it work by mods, upgrading/tweaking my comp, post bug reports, patch, and ultimatly if that did not work, return the game. The whining over stupid developers who cannot produce bug-free games disturb me, however. What is the point?

Syndicate was the last good patch-free game - and I don't believe that will change until computers and software development as a whole has changed a great lot.

Dissect this post at will; it's not like I'd care.

 

[Vaiks]

Windows XP gives you the BSOD. Excel and Word some times apologyses for making a mistake and having to re-start. You complain about the work lost on your spreadsheet and move on!

You dont return to the store with your windows or office for a refund. You patch it. With Windows we have 2 service packs and 100's of fixes. People complain but their move on with their lifes.

 

[EoE]

Windows XP gives you the BSOD. Excel and Word some times apologyses for making a mistake and having to re-start. You complain about the work lost on your spreadsheet and move on!

You dont return to the store with your windows or office for a refund. You patch it. With Windows we have 2 service packs and 100's of fixes. People complain but their move on with their lifes.

The very obvious difference is of course, that you can actually start and run the unpatched versions of Windows and Office, while some people cannot even do that with Civ IV. Software will have bugs, I agree. But the sort of critical bugs Civ IV shipped with are below the standard in the industry.

rgds/EoE

 

[Dairuka]

The very obvious difference is of course, that you can actually start and run the unpatched versions of Windows and Office, while some people cannot even do that with Civ IV. Software will have bugs, I agree. But the sort of critical bugs Civ IV shipped with are below the standard in the industry.

Blue Screen of Death.

Need I say more?

 

[haard]

The very obvious difference is of course, that you can actually start and run the unpatched versions of Windows and Office, while some people cannot even do that with Civ IV. Software will have bugs, I agree. But the sort of critical bugs Civ IV shipped with are below the standard in the industry.

rgds/EoE

The very obvious difference is of course, that Firaxis cannot create a sub-par interface to cIV and get hardware vendors to supply drivers tailor made for that interface, and have everybody blame the drivers as soon as things go wrong. Software will have bugs, I agree. But the sort of sub-par os and hardware access libraries Windows ships with are below the standard in the industry.