Why didn't like you civ5?

[damerell]

I was referring precisely to the 1UPT feature, which is unrealistic and illogical in relation to the scale of the game, and it affects negatively the game play, unsuccessfully combining a "tactical map" (think of age of empires) with a "strategic map" (think of chess).

But one does not follow from the other. It doesn't affect the gameplay negatively because it's unrealistic; there are plenty of equally unrealistic mechanics with satisfactory gameplay.

That's what my comment was about, and of course, it is MY PERSONAL OPINION to say that the more realistic a game is, the more fun I (yes, me) find it.

It's also not true. Would you prefer, say, a variant of Master of Orion reflecting the reality that FTL travel and communication are impossible? A variant of Civ where unit movement is handled realistically relative to the timescale, so you've got to make 4 million warrior moves before popping your first tech? Didn't think so.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Would you prefer, say, a variant of Master of Orion reflecting the reality that FTL travel and communication are impossible?

That may or may not be impossible. It's impossible with our current level of understanding, but so was the internet 100 years ago.

That said, a game designed around that limitation and forcing players to plan around it could be interesting (book series called forever war explored that to some degree; soldiers would arrive after being kept in a suspended state knowing that they might be very far ahead or behind their enemy in terms of technology, tactics, etc due to travel time and when each side sent their force to a particular combat area).

Still, your point stands nicely. If one were to take realism in civ to its fullest extreme, it would be impossible to complete a game in one lifetime .

 

[JeffreyLXV]

I just finished playing some Civ 5 and then came here to get a map to play some Civ 4. LOL

Unlike in Civ 4 where the fate of the game seems to rest in every turn or move, the decisions don't feel that critical in Civ 5.

At least that's my impression. There are things I like about Civ 5, but falling asleep on the keyboard isn't one of them.

 

[TheWilltoAct]

But one does not follow from the other. It doesn't affect the gameplay negatively because it's unrealistic; there are plenty of equally unrealistic mechanics with satisfactory gameplay.



It's also not true. Would you prefer, say, a variant of Master of Orion reflecting the reality that FTL travel and communication are impossible? A variant of Civ where unit movement is handled realistically relative to the timescale, so you've got to make 4 million warrior moves before popping your first tech? Didn't think so.

I think you are being deliberately obtuse.

Once you admit that reality and realism are subjective, certainly in this context, I feel your argument is defeated. But that would be taking the easy way out. I think the more compelling "evidence" is the advent of games (or at least modes of games) which seek to remove safeguards and inhibit the player's ability to survive. "Survival" modes are popular because they increase the skill and intensity required to succeed, by simulating circumstances that the player can rationalize as realistic; the thought being that by removing conventions that exist to protect the player, a more raw and relatable experience emerges.

 

[mynystry]

But one does not follow from the other. It doesn't affect the gameplay negatively because it's unrealistic; there are plenty of equally unrealistic mechanics with satisfactory gameplay.

I am sorry to be repetitive, but it seems you didn't read, or just plainly ignored what I pointed out, even underlined, in the post you just quoted:

I was referring precisely to the 1UPT feature, which is unrealistic and illogical in relation to the scale of the game, and it affects negatively the game play, unsuccessfully combining a "tactical map" (think of age of empires) with a "strategic map" (think of chess).

That pair of words: "in relation", means that I don't speak of "absolute reality" (if such thing exists). I am referring to the game's reality. For example: Mages and Dragon's fit very well within Kael's FfH2 Mod and both are fantasy. Nuclear bombs wouldn't fit into the reality of that game.

I stand by my opinion: SoD fit much better the Civilization "world" (to avoid using the term "reality") than 1UPT. Not to say that SoD is perfect, but I find it much better than the new approach in Civ5. I am sure many will agree with me.

Edit:

Just to make it clear:

I dislike the idea of 1UPT as done in Civ5

I think it has potential, when I heard about it I imagined they were bringing back the armies from Civ3... Oh boy, I wish I'd have been right!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It depends what 1 UPT represents in civ V terms. Considering the "scale" at which that game operates, and the amount of freaking turns it takes to build one thing, you could understandably assume that 1 unit is actually the equivalent of a tremendous amount of soldiers.

It's notable that in every civ game every unit is the same size as an entire city (true even in civ IV), so the scale is necessarily questionable from the beginning.

This isn't a clear-cut "dragons vs nukes" case, it's already a case of an environment purported as simulating reality that is fundamentally different from reality to a tremendous extent. The scale of *every* civ game is outright nonsense. Units move like snails (grass can spread faster than early game units can move), and yet it's possible to amass tremendous quantities of these snail forces in the same timefrime as it takes already assembled forces to move. Meanwhile, even though each of them are as large as cities (cities do not take up multiple tiles or hexes), neither stacking them infinitely nor being completely unable to do so make any sense at all.

None of these soldiers ever get old, nor does their leader, which is good because it takes the ancients a while to do anything. Cities are capable of manipulating and gaining yield from land 20x their size too! How many cities could do something like that in history?

The only scale violation in 1UPT is that there aren't enough hexes and cities aren't big enoug relative to any one individual hex (nor is there enough space between them). Civ has always been, from civ 1 until now, scaled to cluster/clutter armies and V while in many ways different is no exception in that regard.

 

[mitebe]

For full disclosure; I did not purchase the game when it came out. There were too many signs it was an unfinished product. I got it a year later for 75% off and still feel jipped. I purchased G&K either during last falls or winters steam sale also for 75% off and hadn't played it until last week. I wanted to give CiV another chance with the expansion to see if my feelings have changed. So I have been playing every night since then to see if the game had changed enough for my feelings to change. They have not.

Reasons I do not like CiV.

1upt
The first in the series to become less complex

1upt just doesn't work on a strategic level, at least with the size of the maps as implemented in ciV. Plus it is just not historically how armies moved around. Take a look at Sherman's march through the south and you will see his army breaks up into smaller columns so they can forage on the move but they all come together when battles are fought. Plus each column is more than a single unit (yes, that begs the how to compare real units with Civ units but I digress). I know they were trying to solve the perceived SOD problem but they failed and should have known it early enough in the process to make changes but of course that would violate the apparent direction to simplify the game.

All the previous versions got more complex as the series went on. More unit types, more research options, more wonders, national wonders, more civilizations, religions were added, more government types which brought on civics. CiV was the first to reverse this trend. Less unit types, less research options, smaller maps, less number of units.

Another thing I don't think helped is the number of changes to the core systems of the game. 1upt, hexes, global happiness, city states, units to boats instead of requiring transports, etc, etc. All previous games changed or added or removed things from previous iterations but not on the scale that ciV did.

 

[damerell]

That may or may not be impossible. It's impossible with our current level of understanding, but so was the internet 100 years ago.

That's obviously not true for two reasons. First of all, while the Internet would seem remarkable in 1913, anyone familiar with the electric telegraph and with Babbage's work on programmable computers could have it explained to them and would have no reason to say it was not in principle possible. They might feel it was impossible from an engineering-complexity point of view, but that is entirely unlike the sense in which FTL is impossible.

Secondly, that's an effectively meaningless use of "impossible". FTL is just as impossible as it is for a creature to evolve that does not reproduce in any way, or for a ton of lead weight to spontaneously levitate. If you're allowed to hypothesise that any well-established scientific fact might be wrong, nothing is impossible and everything is realistic; so let's use language in a way that actually conveys meaning.

Once you admit that reality and realism are subjective

Which I don't. Of course there is an issue of judgement, but I don't think it's a subjective matter that a Civ-like game where it does not take a military unit 80 years to stroll from a city to the edge of its borders would be more realistic, if that were the only significant change.

I think the more compelling "evidence" is the advent of games (or at least modes of games) which seek to remove safeguards and inhibit the player's ability to survive.

I don't. Sometimes realism is fun; sometimes it's not. The sort of thing you discuss is fun because it's challenging, not because it's "realistic". I don't think realism is a goal in and of itself except in overt simulation, and even then it is not automatically good; for example, train simulators do not generally make you spend three hours waiting to get up steam before playing a scenario.

That pair of words: "in relation", means that I don't speak of "absolute reality" (if such thing exists). I am referring to the game's reality. For example: Mages and Dragon's fit very well within Kael's FfH2 Mod and both are fantasy. Nuclear bombs wouldn't fit into the reality of that game.

Perhaps if you mean "internal consistency" you should say "internal consistency". That would save a lot of effort, especially if you didn't advance the view that more "realism" implies more fun.

 

[gps]

They might feel it was impossible from an engineering-complexity point of view, but that is entirely unlike the sense in which FTL is impossible.

I am pretty sure there where times when people considered stuff like carriages moving without horses, the concept of talking to people in another town through thin air, the music of a big orchestra coming from little boxes whenever you press a button, pictures with people moving and talking or supersonic or even space flight impossible in exactly the same sense in which FTL is for us today...

 

[Dr. D]

It depends what 1 UPT represents in civ V terms. Considering the "scale" at which that game operates, and the amount of freaking turns it takes to build one thing, you could understandably assume that 1 unit is actually the equivalent of a tremendous amount of soldiers.

It's notable that in every civ game every unit is the same size as an entire city (true even in civ IV), so the scale is necessarily questionable from the beginning.

Things took forever to build at release, but I think you would find that the patches have solved that problem. It was ridiculous... it made no sense to build things that took so long when you could just buy them. Thankfully, that is no longer the case.

One thought regarding city scale: I've always considered the first ring or two as "part" of the city, avoiding the illusion that it is just one tile in size. Not sure if that helps your stance or not, but I've never thought of a city being just one tile, especially since wonders and city buildings start to spill into these adjacent tiles.

With turn times, it's tough to beat IV. I loved how they sped that up. However, my experience was that the turns in III took longer than V. I wanted to kill myself each time I saw a battleship move tile by tile to bombard my railroads and other improvements for what seemed like an eternity. I understand that's different than the sheer computation time of V (yeah, why does it take so long even at 4000 BC?) but waiting is waiting and I remember III being worse than V.

 

[damerell]

I am pretty sure there where times when people considered stuff like carriages moving without horses, the concept of talking to people in another town through thin air, the music of a big orchestra coming from little boxes whenever you press a button, pictures with people moving and talking or supersonic or even space flight impossible in exactly the same sense in which FTL is for us today...

Well, you'd be wrong, then. Of course they would be casually supposed to be impossible, but I cannot think that any of them would be impossible in the sense of directly violating what were then supposed to be the fundamental physical laws of the universe.

People - partly conditioned by SF - tend to think of FTL as a jolly hard engineering problem that we happen to have no idea how to solve. It's not.

Suppose we're before Einstein; we only have Newtonian mechanics. "If I exert a force of one Newton on a previously stationary mass of one kilogram (on which no other forces are acting or will act) for one second, it will accelerate to one meter/second. It is impossible that it will accelerate to another speed". That's the sense in which FTL is impossible; if you call it possible you really can call anything possible.

 

[Ghpstage]

^^ AFAIK the violations only apply to the hard definition of FTL, as in its physically impossible to go faster than the local speed of light. Theres nothing that specifically prohibits other methods of travelling 'FTL' in the common sense.

 

[gps]

I cannot think that any of them would be impossible in the sense of directly violating what were then supposed to be the fundamental physical laws of the universe.

There you have it. You said it yourself: it's impossible in the sense of directly violating what were then supposed to be the fundamental physical laws of the universe.
It's a strange hubris in a time where the acquisition of knowledge goes faster than ever before in human history to think we already know all there is to know - for example regarding FTL. I don't claim FTL is absolutely possible. As far as I know and as far as some of our best scientists know it is impossible, but we can't really be sure. In exactly the same sense somebody in the middle ages would have said talking to distant people through thin air is absolutely impossible (or he might have considered it satanic magic, which at that time was actually supposed to be a fundamental physical law of the universe!). But in the end he was proven wrong. And so might we regarding the impossibility of FTL...

 

[mynystry]

Originally Posted by TheWilltoAct
Once you admit that reality and realism are subjective

Which I don't.

Exactly: that's the reason of why all this "argument" came out. As you can see other readers could understand the idea, because they took the meaning of the word "reality" in a wider, more flexible sense. But If you refuse to do that OK, have it your own way then, just take my post and change "reality" for "internal consistency" and that's the idea.

As for "the subjectivity of reality" and the existance of "different realities", I think those are just too "off-topic" to be discussed here.

 

[damerell]

^^ AFAIK the violations only apply to the hard definition of FTL, as in its physically impossible to go faster than the local speed of light. Theres nothing that specifically prohibits other methods of travelling 'FTL' in the common sense.

Then you are mistaken. Any FTL travel directly implies causality violation.

It's a strange hubris in a time where the acquisition of knowledge goes faster than ever before in human history to think we already know all there is to know - for example regarding FTL.

Which is not the position I'm advancing, of course. What I'm saying is that if you're willing to suggest any given bit of science might be wrong, you can make anything possible. In most FPSes you can survive being shot several times - why, that is possible, because it might be the case that half of biology and medicine is wrong and if you eat enough homeopathic bullet pills, you won't care about being shot. Civ 5's 1UPT? Why, maybe tomorrow the repulsive force between electrons will change to be a repulsive force between military units, and what do you know, it's perfectly realistic after all!

Of course we could be wrong, but we could be wrong about anything (and Einstein's relativity is on pretty solid ground as such things go). If "impossible" is to mean anything at all, then a game that depicts FTL travel depicts something impossible.

 

[Rusty Edge]

I think it has potential, when I heard about it I imagined they were bringing back the armies from Civ3... Oh boy, I wish I'd have been right!

Well, to get closer to the original topic of the thread, are there any other Civ III game elements you would have liked to see return to the series in V, besides armies?

 

[TheWilltoAct]

Exactly: that's the reason of why all this "argument" came out. As you can see other readers could understand the idea, because they took the meaning of the word "reality" in a wider, more flexible sense. But If you refuse to do that OK, have it your own way then, just take my post and change "reality" for "internal consistency" and that's the idea.

As for "the subjectivity of reality" and the existance of "different realities", I think those are just too "off-topic" to be discussed here.

We seem to ascribe to a similar mode of logic; indeed a similar reality?

damerell I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my commentary.

 

[damerell]

Well, to get closer to the original topic of the thread, are there any other Civ III game elements you would have liked to see return to the series in V, besides armies?

I'd love the "go to city XYZ" UI element in Civ IV, I can tell you that.

 

[mynystry]

Well, to get closer to the original topic of the thread, are there any other Civ III game elements you would have liked to see return to the series in V, besides armies?

Well, it's been a while since the last time I played Civ3... I remember I liked much better the graphics from Civ3 over those of Civ4, it took me a while to switch because of that. At first I think Civ3PTW was superior to Civ4 Vanilla in different aspects, but they were fixing and adding features with the expansions so Civ4BTS is far superior to Civ3 in almost everything I would say.

Maybe one thing that I don't like so much of Civ4 is the "Suicide Siege", I liked the way Siege worked in Civ3, but maybe the new mechanics are necessary to keep the balance of the gameplay.... although not comepletely sure.

Also I miss some units, buildings and wonders, I don't remember all of them, but it comes to my mind Guerrilla Fighters and Leonardo's Workshop just to say some.

 

[MilesBeyond]

With the Promotions system, Leonardo's Workshop would make a welcome addition to CIV, though it might take a bit of care to balance it properly (for those wondering, CIII Leonardo's Workshop made unit upgrades half price).