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Sid Meier on Civ III
Irishman writes "ZDNet News has an interview with Sid Meier and Jeff Briggs about the upcoming Civ III. For any Civ fans, this is a must read. I am now having flashbacks of days without sleep, trying to capture that last city or win the game in a different way. "
Ahhh... an army of one.
Yes, there's nothing like the feeling of watching one tiny little iron age swordsman defeat a modern day tank, one tiny chunk at a time.
(doesn't that just give you a great mental picture - Russell Crowe takes on an M1 Abrams?)
Granted I am not expecting Microsoft Flight Simulator, 2002, Terrorist Edition.
But I wonder how, in games like Civ III, and others in the gendre, they will include the potential for the outrageous without screwing up game play.
Take for example, the scenario discussed in this paper. Yes, very radical, but effective.
and would we even want such a capability in a game, to give terrorists ideas? At this point we have the issue of realism in gameplay vs helping the sociopaths of the world.
I am not saying that this would drive the fragile minds of children over the edge. I am looking at those already warped and twisted by years of training in training camps with the very best of modern mind flushing techniques. Do we want to help wackos like these?
[Just a disturbing thought, from the middle of a hangover on sunday morning.]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Does anybody else think that CivIII sounds waaay to similar to Call to Power 2? I bought CTP2 a good while ago and I am still playing it very happily. I really can't see anything (except maybe the new resource system - needing horses for building chariots, etc) which would make me buy it.
;-).
Many of the things added to this release of Civ (trading routes anyone) are already in CTP2.
I wonder why they Sid didn't push for something more radical - the previous post about the hex grid would be just right
But anyway, I'll wait for some reviews and coparisons before rushing out to buy it.
So... maybe I'm missing something here, but... given a choice between moving in eight directions or moving in six directions, eight directions seems to create the richer gaming experience. But maybe that is just me.
IAAL,BIANLY
A better question is, "Why Cleopatra?" How about a real ancient Egyptian ruler like Ramses or Nefertiti, or a modern one (Sadat?), not one who was most famous for handing the country over to the Romans?
(The answer: becuase they never made a movie about Nefertiti. Oh brother...)
The interview didn't really answer the questions I have about the game.
Have they done anything about the micromanagement hell seen in Civ II? A little after the industrial revolution I find it seems to take forever to make things happen.
Are the AI's a little better? do the computer players still cheat? I assume so, but hopefully not as bad as before.
I definitely like the improvements though. Culture is gonna add a new dynamic to the game and certain resources being required will make things interesting.
I'll be looking forward to playing it... many sleepless nights ahead...
Many of the changes the developers mentioned in the article don't seem like great ideas to me.
:) ) The way old Civ calculates the cost of new technologies mades the effect even stronger, perhaps in fact too strong. The ability to skew your technological progress quite strongly is fun, and probably relatively realistic by Civ standards - look at all the pretty advanced preliterate civilisations that existed. "Ages" don't seem the solution to me.
:(
Special gimmick units that are only available to a specific civilisation? Yuck, no thanks. Relatively heavily-classed players may have worked quite well in Alpha Centauri (which I haven't played much), but I'd rather Civ kept giving players the ability to choose their strengths and weaknesses "in-band" and to change those trade-offs over time as circumstances dictate, rather than locking them into one optimal style of play at the start of the game.
I don't see why the tech tree needs to be bodged with "ages", either. Yes, in Civs past you can, for example, specialise relentlessly to get a particular technology. If you keep it up too long, however, the dependencies bite hard and you have a huge amount of "filling in" to do before you can progress. (RPM fans will recognise this as the Gnucash effect.
I'm also not sold on the changes to Wonders. Doesn't a reproducible Small Wonder defeat the idea of a Wonder somewhat? More fundamentally, in Civ I-II, Wonders were too good to be ignored, but not so powerful that they dominated the game: a nice balance. I wouldn't like to see them become more central to the game. They're mostly candy-floss. Too much bonus-grabbing candyfloss and not enough civilisation-building meat and potatoes is very un-nourishing and will make you feel sick before long. Moreover, the more exceptions-based and bonus-heavy you make a game, the more vulnerable it becomes to the game-breaking "killer strategies" and unstoppable units so familiar from RTS Hell (and many other places, like munchkin tabletop RPGs). Playtesting helps, I'm sure, but if even one slips through, that's the end of the game as a good multiplayer expeerience. Gotta catch 'em all... (ugh, sorry, couldn't resist it!)
It's hard to say much about the new culture score from the little detail given, but I wonder what it adds to the many standards of comparison that Civ already has. In general, it seems as if "second-system effect" may finally have caught up with Civilisation. I'm sure the AI will improve in Civilisation III, but I suspect that the gameplay will get more elaborate but not better, maybe worse. Not that Civ's gameplay is beyond improvement; the things I'd love to see are even better and more detailed player-player (especially human-AI) interaction, and systems to help take some of the drudgery and guesswork out of city and transport management, without taking away the power to control things in detail when you want to.
Of course I could be wrong: all I have to go on is the article, and Civ III could turn out to be a great game without, despite, or even because of the changes I've criticised. Given its makers, I'm sure it will be a good game, whether or not it improves on its ancestors. I'm also sure that it will sell many copies and be widely praised, whether or not it's an especially good game.
I just wanted to again point out that according to gamespot, civ 3 will not be multiplay. I think this is very disappointing. Reviews/Previews of civ3 that I have seen only seem to mention this in fine print or at the end. This need mentioning so people know this before they buy. Personaly I can't bring myself to buy a strategy game without multiplayer support. (10 years ago maybe but not today) Alpha is most fun when played as a multiplyer game. To me this smacks pretty heavily on relying on code from 10 years ago. Someone please tell me this is not the case. If this is not the case, why would a company design a game without thinking 'multiplayer' right from the start. (They could of at least used the code from Alpha). ..O well, back to those mind worms.
What you're railing against is something typical in the game industry. Somebody comes out with a revolutionary game that really makes a mark - and that's it. He's shot his creative wad. I could name quite a few games/designers where this has happened, but I'm sure you could too if you think about it.
If you're having trouble getting started here's one: Carmack/Romero and Doom. Everything after Doom was just a refinement of the same concept. Quake III is nothing more than Doom revved up to 3D standards.
There's nothing wrong with this, except perhaps that people come to think that *every* game put out by that designer is bound to be something new and exciting. If you come to accept that two strokes of genius from the same person are pretty rare, then you won't be disappointed if future offerings are just variations on the theme. Instead, you'll look to fresh talent for big changes rather than those who've already done their bit.
I'm going to buy Civ III, but I doubt it'll be that much different from Civ II or Civ I. I don't expect it to be and I won't really care if it isn't. Sid Meier has done his thing, made his mark, and I don't expect that Civ III will revolutionize anything. I'll look to others, yet untried, for the next new thing.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Both of the above mentioned alternatives can be achieved mostly by diplomacy, and by choosing your alliances carefully.
Also in SMAC the "corner the global energy market" (Economic victory) option should also be quite doable without war. Actually, if you want to save up the energy amounts needed, I'd preferrably try spending only whatever I need to defend my borders on military. Gotta try that next weekend :)
Just some things I'd like to see in the new game:
- better AI. Please, by all that's holy, a better AI. Better at *everything* - expansion, city development, conducting war, etc. One that doesn't break treaties every five turns and attack willy-nilly, even though I've beat on the damned computer player but good the last half-dozen times it decided to stab me in the back.
One of the things I really detest about all the Civ games is the fact that the AI continually starts wars, especially when it doesn't have a prayer of forcing even a minor victory. It slows the game down enormously having to deal with all these 'irritation' attacks. This almost forces you to go on a world-conquest rampage just to keep the game from bogging down and getting boring.
- much slower tech advancement. All the Civ games are cursed with tech advancement which races by so fast you don't have time to build all of the city improvements you might want, or even field an army before it becomes outdated. It's impossible to have 'period' warfare (e.g., musketeers and cannon) because once your army is created you'll already be producing the next great thing (e.g., riflemen). I 'fix' this by slowing down tech advances by a factor of 20 when I play the game, meaning that there'll be at least some measure of time spent in each 'period' before advancing to the next. I just hope the game gives you the option of doing this without having to monkey with the tech tree and rules.txt files.
- I liked CTP's replacement of the Settler units. I'm sorry to see Civ III will include Workers, pretty much the same thing. CTP cut out the micromanagement required by having Settler units and this made me a very happy camper. It's too bad that Civ III will add this annoying bit of micromanagement back into the game.
- Pollution: use some other model than having Workers clean it up. Like irritation attacks, having to direct your workers to all the spots that develop pollution each turn (because the AI is too stupid to do it properly on its own) is very time-consuming - and boooorring. Really, have a 'Superfund' or something along these lines instead.
- Age advancement: no one likes to see musketeers or even pikemen take on a tank and win. So why not incorporate age advancement in a more substantial way: when one civilization advances to a new age (with substantially different combat technology), they *all* do with immediate upgrades to field units. However - those civs that are behind the civ that triggered the event still have to research the various techs to get all the goodies/upgrades for that age.
- larger maps with smaller scale.
- better control of the terrain when randomly generating a map. For example, being able to specify 'no desert', or saying '20% of all squares will be mountains', or 'make 3 discrete continents'. Hand-crafting a map is dull and, of course, kills the element of surprise, but the map generator in all the Civs is crude and not very good at the job. I'd like to be able to set specific characteristics and let the generator do it's bit based upon the parameters I give it.
That about does it for my wish list. Everything else is gravy.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?