www.civ4.com signs

[Sirian]

The mysterious ways of software development.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Whoever the people are that are working on the game, we just have to hope they give it enough of a workout to make sure it's balanced, fun and the game everyone hopes it can be. I think they can do it, I'm willing to bet my enjoyment of CIV (and more) on it.

 

[Sirian]

CIV? C-IV? C for Civilization and a four in Roman numerals? Gah. Please stop that before you give them bad ideas. I mean, I could put up with that on a desktop shortcut icon, but if that much "cuteness" is put into use the way you've done in multiple posts... I'll probably barf.

Seriously... as someone who has played Civ on and off for thirteen years, I cannot get past the notion that See Eye Vee means Civ, not C4. And if you persist on calling it CIV, I may start to ignore you.

I hope I don't have to get midieval on anybody.


- Sirian

 

[Jon Shafer]

Yeah yeah, I know, CIV = Civ with caps lock on. I don't even like it. But my brain works in mysterious ways and I can't help but call it that.

As for you ignoring me, please don't, that would make me very sad, as I am a sensitive person who always goes with the flow and I just want to be loved by everyone.

 

[warpstorm]

And yet Firaxis did not make the second expansion. That got farmed out to a third party: Breakaway Games. Breakaway did a lot of things right, but no new AI code (or at least none worth its salt) got written for these new features, so players can exploit them to the max while the AI just stands there.

There is some truth to this allegation (and I'm a Breakaway employee - although I wasn't then), but it isn't totally true.

Now for my obligitory defense of my friends (both at Breakaway and Firaxis).

Firaxis didn't "farm out" the project to Breakaway. Firaxis directly managed everything. There was nothing that was put in or taken out of the game without Firaxis' approval. This is their game. We were "hired help". Our name doesn't even appear on the box cover. It's not like they said, "Civ is yours now, run with it". Rather they retained creative control and decided the priorities on the expansion. They were in our offices most every day (and many nights). Jesse, in particular was very dedicated.

We did mostly new content creation (Conquests, units, abilities, artwork - in fact, most of our staff on that project were artists and scenario designers - IIRC, Firaxis only budgeted for two programmers at Breakaway) and this was our priority, and were told that putting in new features was the absolute highest priority (whether or not the AI knew how to use them well). AI was very much secondary.

If the priorities were different, I'm sure the results would have been different. If we were told to make the AI be good at X, Y, and Z at the expense of new features, I have no doubt they would have been good, but that's not what we were paid to do.

As always in business, time and money were issues. We were under a fixed price, fixed time contract. There was more that we would have liked to have done, but there wasn't time or people available to do it.

(Note that this is my opinion on what happened and not in any way an official Breakaway response, I didn't even work there then).

 

[dh_epic]

Yeah that makes sense. Usually somebody is telling somebody else what to do, that's how the software industry works