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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. "
All that time spent in front of the screen insted of working.
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I am hoping for larger maps (in the sense that they are more detailed than previous versions, not actually a larger area of land). Real terrain, where you can use the terrain for battle advantage, etc. That would be cool.
I don't need real 3D environments for a game like this, it doesn't need it.
It is so I won't have to leave the computer when CivIII comes out.
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"
Is there anyone else that gets as irritated with square grids as I do?
A hex grid more closely resembles a "circle" of influence. With a square grid you have to cut corners off a square. This results in a whole bunch of funky problems:
1) It's impossible to put your cities adjacent to each other without wasting space. The best you can do is waste two spaces per group of four cities. This ain't bad but odds are that some important resource is going to be stuck on one of those wasted squares. A hex grid would make it possible to pack cities close together in several different designs while still not wasting any space.
2) Units get jammed up on enemy units because they are diagonally adjacent. It's absurd because while the computer won't let you move sideways when there is a unit at the diagonal, you can move down and diagonally to end up in the same place. With a hex grid, movement from each space basically forks into two opposite directions. So it's very easy to go around units without getting caught in these kinds of bogus traps.
3) People argue that square grids are easier to navigate with a standard keypad. This is entirely untrue. Other strat games that have hex grids still use the keypad, they simply use either the top and bottom row or left and right column (depending on how the hex grid is oriented). The bonus is that you have three extra buttons now to control movement.
The continued use of the square grid is the one thing about Civ/CivII/AlphaC that I absolutely detest. I really wish someone at Firaxis could have thought to change that with this upcoming CivIII game...but perhaps the next one will finally be this way.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Sorry to interrupt the mutual-masturbation fest that's going on here, but isn't it high time we started seeing something new out of Sid Meier? I had a lot of respect for the guy when the first Civilization came out, because between that, Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, he'd really created a variety of strategy games that were engrossing and fun to play, and also replayable in different ways. I'd skipped Civ2 because there were other new games coming out that I wanted to try out instead, and when I bought Colonization and Alpha Centauri, I was a little bit underwhelmed, to be blunt. (Didn't try Antietam so I can't comment on that...)
I know that Sid Meier has what it takes to make a really fun and creative and new game, so why is he limiting himself to sequels and knock-offs of his previous stuff? I mean, here was a guy who practically created his own genre of games -- and it's this sort of experimentation and risk that pushes the industry forward. Right now, though, he's just resting on his laurels.
I've seen the descriptions of Civ3 and I'll probably be all over it when it gets to the bargain bin, and I'll probably play it so much that I'll lose sleep or miss a deadline or something. But still, I'd be a lot more excited about an impending product from Firaxis if I knew it was going to do what it did in the late 80s/early 90s and take some chances and try to push the entire industry to a new level, instead of just improving the game logic on his own tried-and-true formulas.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Cleopatra was a GREEK, folks! Not black.
For that matter, the other Egyptians weren't black either.
For that matter, neither are they today.
Where in the heck do these ideas come from?
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I'm gonna wait to buy this game until it goes multiplayer. According to the CIV3 FAQ, the game will not have multiplayer support when it ships, although they plan on making some multiplayer options available in Spring 2002. (Not holding my breath.)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The most annoying thing about Civ, Civ2, and SMAC (and probably Civ3) is that the game devolves to total war. Despite being titled and nominally about "civilization", it's really war. While you supposedly can win by the flight to Alpha Centauri (or the Ascent to Transendence), these are usually victories by side effect. You've had to militarity conquer or at least beat down, all opponents by the time you win by these other methods. What if it were more of a civilization simulator; think SimCity on a larger scale. It would be nice if there were a setting for the AI to be less fanatical war machines and more into peaceful competition.
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.
If anyone is interested in more information about civ 3, two of the best sites are:
http://www.apolyton.net/civ3/
http://www.civfanatics.com
Why help them with their research? Much better to just broadly censor everybody who wants to play with theories about disaster scenarios. Such dangerous ideas should be restricted to people who are trained for such things. Right?
Censorship is never, ever the answer.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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?