inthesomeday
Immortan
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2015
- Messages
- 2,798
I think that the issue comes at all in trying to make grand strategy/history playable in the way Civ tries to do so. I love Civilization and I love to have complete mind control over every single citizen of an entire political entity. However, in a strategy game that tries to have some semblance of historicity, this doesn't make any sense.
I've played Civilization for roughly 8 years now, although I started with Civilization 1. I was very young at the time and it never was really something I thought about until I started playing 4 and then 5, because I came of an older age. The game can't decide whether it wants you to control a political organization or an ethnic group, and it poorly represents history by making it so there are 6-20 groups of people throughout all of history and they never change.
In the past, I've justified it by saying that what the player is controlling is the entire will of the people, and rather than thinking of it as actually literally spending thousands of years building a single shack that can hold food, for the sake of my own suspension of disbelief I think of it as a group of people living in the city that I represent the collective will of deciding to devote a certain period of their history towards the construction of better agricultural networking/population support infrastructure.
This would work perfectly well, except, because Civilization is a game franchise owned by a company, it has to have wide appeal that provides a clear cause and effect gameplay; there have to be quantifiable resources to be collected and spent like money, and units must move tactically and all of it must be precise.
The problem is that the scale and the method of gameplay are incompatible, and OP has suggested a solution, which is changing the scale to accommodate the method of gameplay. Going from 6000-years-in-3-hours to a scale of time that works better with the nature of the tactical and resource collection aspects of the game. Historical processes that are poorly reflected as game concepts throughout civilization that are too numerous to name can be argued within the context of either style of gameplay, but that isn't the argument here. The argument is a simple one that I think everyone here agrees with, which is to say that the scale and the gameplay are not compatible.
I think the OP's proposal is the ideal way to handle it. The human brain's tolerance for gaming requires immediate gratification and cause-and-effect reward systems, but civilization is built for people who are simultaneously capable of enjoying grand strategy to the very core of the term. I think sticking with the current gameplay elements but drastically reducing the simplification of the game's scale and pacing is the proper way to go about making the game the best ever made.
Of course, the conversation isn't about specific game mechanics or historical concepts and how to apply them. It could easily become about that, but that isn't what everybody's arguing about (despite agreeing).
I've played Civilization for roughly 8 years now, although I started with Civilization 1. I was very young at the time and it never was really something I thought about until I started playing 4 and then 5, because I came of an older age. The game can't decide whether it wants you to control a political organization or an ethnic group, and it poorly represents history by making it so there are 6-20 groups of people throughout all of history and they never change.
In the past, I've justified it by saying that what the player is controlling is the entire will of the people, and rather than thinking of it as actually literally spending thousands of years building a single shack that can hold food, for the sake of my own suspension of disbelief I think of it as a group of people living in the city that I represent the collective will of deciding to devote a certain period of their history towards the construction of better agricultural networking/population support infrastructure.
This would work perfectly well, except, because Civilization is a game franchise owned by a company, it has to have wide appeal that provides a clear cause and effect gameplay; there have to be quantifiable resources to be collected and spent like money, and units must move tactically and all of it must be precise.
The problem is that the scale and the method of gameplay are incompatible, and OP has suggested a solution, which is changing the scale to accommodate the method of gameplay. Going from 6000-years-in-3-hours to a scale of time that works better with the nature of the tactical and resource collection aspects of the game. Historical processes that are poorly reflected as game concepts throughout civilization that are too numerous to name can be argued within the context of either style of gameplay, but that isn't the argument here. The argument is a simple one that I think everyone here agrees with, which is to say that the scale and the gameplay are not compatible.
I think the OP's proposal is the ideal way to handle it. The human brain's tolerance for gaming requires immediate gratification and cause-and-effect reward systems, but civilization is built for people who are simultaneously capable of enjoying grand strategy to the very core of the term. I think sticking with the current gameplay elements but drastically reducing the simplification of the game's scale and pacing is the proper way to go about making the game the best ever made.
Of course, the conversation isn't about specific game mechanics or historical concepts and how to apply them. It could easily become about that, but that isn't what everybody's arguing about (despite agreeing).
