Blasphemous
Graulich
Hi everybody.
This mod project is very important to me and I invest a lot of my time in it, time that becomes harder and harder to find. I have been involved with RoC/X/RFC/W for a very long time now and I don't even remember what Civ 3 or 4 is like without these mods. I bought Warlords a couple weeks ago because RFCW was in beta. But I'm thinking now that maybe I need a break from Civ.
This is what it comes down to: I think we're losing focus. I think this is because of how far we've gotten. The dedicated forum was one of the most important steps. Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely great and tremendously productive that we have our own dedicated forum. This lets some very important issues get discussed in-depth. The Big Ol' Thread would never have provided the intense kind of brainstorming and development discussions we've seen here. Think about the UHV thread, which went in a matter of weeks from speculation to playtesting. Think of the Nine Ideas thread we have going now. But I firmly believe that if you look hard enough, any good thing has an equal bad side. This may be one case where I have looked hard enough.
I want to go back a bit, back to the jolly days of Civ 3. Back then, we had a pretty cool mod, and we kept seeing pretty amazing realistic scenarios sprout out of the sheer realism of the setup that Rhye rigged up there, but as a mod community we were acutely aware that Civ 3 would never allow us to make the mod reflect even a majority of the things we thought were important to have in an alternate history simulator. Then along came cIV with its amazingly superior modding capabilities, and the feeling that we've all had all this time is that there is very little beyond our reach, and certainly with some abstractions we can get everything we want in time. This is probably true.
So what the hell am I ranting about? This is no simple issue, but I'll lay it down as I see it. Because the community has grown, numerically as well as spatially, we have a huge number of things going on here at once. And it's hard to see the big picture like that. There's a phrase in Hebrew, מרוב עצים לא רואים את היער, /merov 'etzim lo ro'im et haya'ar/ loosely "the forest is hard to see because of all the trees". The big picture is so big that it's hard to see that it's still a picture. When we had one thread, there could never be more than maybe three or four discussions at a time. It was terribly inconvenient but it also made sure discussion stayed in one chunk and not all over the place.
I'll give an example that I know is ambiguous because I know this entire situation is not clear-cut: the addition of UHVs. The idea - and it's a great idea - became a hot topic when dh_epic posted a nice big thread about the concept. He made a good point and it seemed all we needed to discuss was implementation. So we discussed that, rather quickly reached something like consensus, and before we knew it there was a build of the mod with a UHV system and bells on. The good thing here is that this feature was added. It's a great feature with huge potential. The bad side is that the power balance of the civs is still slowly being tweaked and it's pretty much impossible to judge the UHV goals without the context of a constant, well-established power balance. In one build goal Xv1.0 is impossible, in the next build the slightly altered goal Xv1.1 is too easy. Then the next build with the yet-improved Xv1.2 is just a little too hard, and well, you get the point. It will now take a very long time to make all UHVs achievable and even longer to make the difficulty of the goals fair and consistent.
I definitely don't blame Rhye for adding this feature. In fact, I don't blame anybody for any of this. I just think our community needs to find itself some focus if we want the mod to develop well. I'm not going to make any points on what I think the big picture is because I feel (or hope) I always do that when arguing anything in any thread in this forum. I just want us all to think about the big picture and to start focusing discussion so the things that are important for the mod as a whole will get the fine tuning they need before we get too engaged in the small details that have less of an effect on the greater scheme of things.
I've written a lot and I'm rather tired already (it's been a long day), so I won't try and give this discussion much direction. This thread could and maybe should be a place where we take a moment to discuss big-picture priorities. Not what fixes and features aught to be implemented first, but what aspects of the mod need the most attention at this juncture. If this goes well we could start another thread with some concrete points of discussion, to develop these ideas into concrete changes to the mod.
I'm posting this thread now because I don't want to just disappear one day and I definitely don't want to slowly fade out of posting and out of memory. I still may decide to take a break from Civ, but before I go and do something like that I want us, as a community, to see if we can get our discussion into proportion.
Civ on!
This mod project is very important to me and I invest a lot of my time in it, time that becomes harder and harder to find. I have been involved with RoC/X/RFC/W for a very long time now and I don't even remember what Civ 3 or 4 is like without these mods. I bought Warlords a couple weeks ago because RFCW was in beta. But I'm thinking now that maybe I need a break from Civ.
This is what it comes down to: I think we're losing focus. I think this is because of how far we've gotten. The dedicated forum was one of the most important steps. Don't get me wrong. It's absolutely great and tremendously productive that we have our own dedicated forum. This lets some very important issues get discussed in-depth. The Big Ol' Thread would never have provided the intense kind of brainstorming and development discussions we've seen here. Think about the UHV thread, which went in a matter of weeks from speculation to playtesting. Think of the Nine Ideas thread we have going now. But I firmly believe that if you look hard enough, any good thing has an equal bad side. This may be one case where I have looked hard enough.
I want to go back a bit, back to the jolly days of Civ 3. Back then, we had a pretty cool mod, and we kept seeing pretty amazing realistic scenarios sprout out of the sheer realism of the setup that Rhye rigged up there, but as a mod community we were acutely aware that Civ 3 would never allow us to make the mod reflect even a majority of the things we thought were important to have in an alternate history simulator. Then along came cIV with its amazingly superior modding capabilities, and the feeling that we've all had all this time is that there is very little beyond our reach, and certainly with some abstractions we can get everything we want in time. This is probably true.
So what the hell am I ranting about? This is no simple issue, but I'll lay it down as I see it. Because the community has grown, numerically as well as spatially, we have a huge number of things going on here at once. And it's hard to see the big picture like that. There's a phrase in Hebrew, מרוב עצים לא רואים את היער, /merov 'etzim lo ro'im et haya'ar/ loosely "the forest is hard to see because of all the trees". The big picture is so big that it's hard to see that it's still a picture. When we had one thread, there could never be more than maybe three or four discussions at a time. It was terribly inconvenient but it also made sure discussion stayed in one chunk and not all over the place.
I'll give an example that I know is ambiguous because I know this entire situation is not clear-cut: the addition of UHVs. The idea - and it's a great idea - became a hot topic when dh_epic posted a nice big thread about the concept. He made a good point and it seemed all we needed to discuss was implementation. So we discussed that, rather quickly reached something like consensus, and before we knew it there was a build of the mod with a UHV system and bells on. The good thing here is that this feature was added. It's a great feature with huge potential. The bad side is that the power balance of the civs is still slowly being tweaked and it's pretty much impossible to judge the UHV goals without the context of a constant, well-established power balance. In one build goal Xv1.0 is impossible, in the next build the slightly altered goal Xv1.1 is too easy. Then the next build with the yet-improved Xv1.2 is just a little too hard, and well, you get the point. It will now take a very long time to make all UHVs achievable and even longer to make the difficulty of the goals fair and consistent.
I definitely don't blame Rhye for adding this feature. In fact, I don't blame anybody for any of this. I just think our community needs to find itself some focus if we want the mod to develop well. I'm not going to make any points on what I think the big picture is because I feel (or hope) I always do that when arguing anything in any thread in this forum. I just want us all to think about the big picture and to start focusing discussion so the things that are important for the mod as a whole will get the fine tuning they need before we get too engaged in the small details that have less of an effect on the greater scheme of things.
I've written a lot and I'm rather tired already (it's been a long day), so I won't try and give this discussion much direction. This thread could and maybe should be a place where we take a moment to discuss big-picture priorities. Not what fixes and features aught to be implemented first, but what aspects of the mod need the most attention at this juncture. If this goes well we could start another thread with some concrete points of discussion, to develop these ideas into concrete changes to the mod.
I'm posting this thread now because I don't want to just disappear one day and I definitely don't want to slowly fade out of posting and out of memory. I still may decide to take a break from Civ, but before I go and do something like that I want us, as a community, to see if we can get our discussion into proportion.
Civ on!
]? No, the French would interfere easily. I guess most of Africa 'should' end up like this) but an extension to Iraq/USAmerica or Taiwan/USAmerica or even Israel/USAmerica (becoming progressively more controversial if not offensive) is less certain and in many ways obviously less intelligent. Having those as Independents makes absolutely no sense in game of course but then would an Independent Finland or Italy make any more sense ; Europe really does need communicating powers throughout. 
