Slashdot Mirror
An Early Look At Civilization V
c0mpliant writes "IGN and Gamespot have each released a preview of the recently announced and eagerly awaited Civilization V. Apart from the obvious new hexagon shape of tiles and improved graphics, the articles go on to outline some of the major changes in the game, such as updated AI, new 'flavors' to world leaders, and a potentially game-changing, one-unit-per-tile system. No more will the stack of doom come to your city's doorsteps. Some features which will not be returning are religion and espionage. The removal of these two have sparked a frenzy of discussion on fan-related forums."
They thought they fixed this with the collateral damage caused by seige weapons. They talk about it on the civ forum. The airstrikes do a pretty good job of weakening the Stack O' Doom
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
I love diplomacy but it sucks when you know the AI is going to cheat. I hope Civ V will finally have an AI that doesn't cheat.
I'm glad they got rid of religion. Hopefully we can get rid of it in this world too.
The pieces can represent anything (battalions or regiments, for instance), so it makes perfect sense.
I think you have fallen into the "OMG IT DRAWS A SINGLE WARRIOR, IT MUST BE A SINGLE MAN!" trap.
"His name was James Damore."
We'll save you a seat, don't worry. In fact, you can sit next to me, big boy.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
My pet gripe with Civs 3 & 4 (never played 2 but LOVED 1) was the time-constrained tech tree.
I used to love dumping all my resources into tech just to get nukes by 1000AD and then quickly ruling the world. Why shouldn't I be allowed to do that in later Civs?
Why can I only get electricity within 100 years of when we discovered it in the real world? Or metallurgy? Or whatever I choose to dump my nation's resources into?
(Oh, and please do an updated version of Alpha Centauri as well...)
-Nano.
The pieces can represent anything (battalions or regiments, for instance), so it makes perfect sense.
But then it would also make perfect sense to be able to combine two or more decimated companies into a battalion, while maintaining the experience and combat abilities.
Also... combine companies into a battalion, battalions into regiments, regiments into armies.
You know... as it is not a single tank (or a man) out there on that hex.
Also, turn your infantry or marines into air cavalry by combining them with helicopters. Make a decimated artillery unit into a "artillery support" bonus for your infantry or armor.
Balance it out with experience bonuses and additional turns necessary for combining (training turns).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Religion, whilst not game changing as many other factors (Hello pratorians!), made an interesting difference to diplomacy and a slight boost to gold. It was also useful to spread to opponents cities to allow spying/gold generation, and was one of the few reasons to consider open borders. It'll be interesting to see how the civics will be altered to reflect the lack of religion. On a side note anyone know of a decent guide to get Civ 4 (or generic guide for games) running under Ubuntu 9.10 x64 with ATI propriety drivers (HD4600)? I've got it working on a different comp using a Geforce card but not the ATI.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Eh, I think from that short little preview I am indifferent. I could see how it could be good, but frankly, nothing in that preview really hit on the 'heart' of Civilization.
Who ever played civilization craving more tactical combat? Who cares if the diplomacy screen has the guys walking around instead of just portrait?
The stuff that makes Civilization games either great or suck is in how it deals with culture, expansion, technology, city management, improvements, government types, etc. Frankly, I don't think Civ4 was much of a jump forwards in terms of Civ games. They added some neat futures, but they also managed to dumb down a lot of interesting things from earlier Civs. The civics from Civ4 were especially vapid and uninteresting.
For my money, I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri. That game had interesting world events, awesome civics, and each nation had a real sense of personality. I personally hope that they go down that road for Civ5 and give the game more personality, rather than strip it down further like they did with Civ4. Granted, it is really still far too early to make any judgments on the game, I am just not terribly hopeful.
I'm excited about the removal of "stacks of doom" for the increase in strategy with battles, but I'm rather disappointed in their PC move of removing religion. Religion has been a huge driving force, if not the greatest motivator, of the last several thousands of years. To remove it and just leave "culture" is a rather silly cop-out to the overly sensitive fools out there.
I don't think I've ever really understood what happened to strategy gaming on the PC around about the turn of the new Millennium.
I was (and still am) a huge fan and player of Heroes Of Might & Magic (I, II, and III), Master Of Orion (2), Total Annihilation and Civilization (I, II, Call To Power and Test Of Time) - likewise I've played and enjoyed PC FPS games from original Doom & Duke Nukem 3D through to STALKER, Half-Life 2 and Fallout 3 today.
Clearly, the FPS genre exists *BECAUSE* of good 3D graphics but who decided that they were needed for strategy games? Fortunately I totally avoided Master Of Orion III but at various points when they were cheap enough to justify rebuying some games I already had, I bought boxed compilations of all the HoMM and Civilization series, the C&C "10 Years" box set (that has everything up to C&C Generals) and Supreme Commander. In each and every case, the introduction of 3D in those games series has felt, to me, like a "dumbing down" of the games...
Firstly, let's look at HoMM and Civilization. These are both traditionally turn-based games where essentially you need to find and control resources at an "empire" level, as well as defeat enemy armies. They are not solely about combat, they are about using your armies to their best advantage - so what in hell does the game gain from a playability perspective by being able to zoom in to see each individual unit in the middle of a fight, i.e. Civilization III/IV and HoMM IV/V?
Secondly, Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander and C&C/Red Alert. There are RTS games but solely focused on small unit skirmishes and resource management, where development speed is core to winning each game... in which case, why in hell do I want (or even need) to mess around with zooming in and twiddling camera views? Just give me a single isometric view with sprite graphics...
These days, as half-Linux half-Windows user, I tend to play Freeciv quite a lot and IMHO it feels more of a logical progression from the original Civ I/II games.
I just wish that if games companies have finished with sprite-based RTS games, then they'd hand out the source code of the games on the Internet to let some good programmers loose on them. The great thing about the pre-3D games is they've low resource requirements and power consumption so great for laptops, netbooks & long flights.
Incidentally, there are a couple of exceptions to the rule - Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II and Sins Of A Solar Empire are fantastic strategy games with built-in 3D but presumably were designed from the ground up with 3D in mind... ...but otherwise 3D graphics have killed any idea of buying any new strategy games.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I've recently discovered the Fall From Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. It's the most sophisticated and complete mod for Civ4 out there. It's a fantasy mod set in a deep and well fleshed out universe
It brings much more new concepts and content than both commercial extensions, Warlords and Beyond the Sword (although it requires these to work).
I expect it to keep me busy enough well past Civ V enters the discount bins. Having the mod ported to Civ V, however, will make me switch in an instant. Hint hint, Firaxis.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
They've got a preview up on Eurogamer as well.
"For my money, I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri."
It was also the weirdest, nerdiest and buggiest game in the series. Lots of the features were neat but the 'design your own unit' things were god awful looking, even though it was cool to do so. I'd love to see AC updated with modern graphics and real effort put into it, a lot of AC was so campy it was a bit disturbing - i.e. religious people in the far flung future, seriously?
Hexes, one unit per tile, ranged attacks, tactical combat, no need to garrison a city... Wow, civ5 will be an overpriced giant 3D Battle of Wesnoth clone.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
religious people in the far flung future, seriously?
Yeah, it's not like they ever put religion in sci-fi, young padawan.
Don't tell me atheists are offended by the very idea that religion may not die out in the next few hundred years? If so, I'm glad sci-fi can still challenge you with unorthodox ideas :)
Just yesterday my wife said to me, "I can't believe you're still not bored of Civ3 after all these years." She knew I was at risk of staying up until 2 a.m. again playing it.
This will not be good for me.
I personally find the best Civilization to be Civ IV. In hindsight, Civ III is probably the most "disapointing" version, but I still think it's better than the previous one. Nowadays if I feel like doing old-school civilization I just play FreeCiv with it's default ruleset. Similar enough to Civ 2, but way more balanced (especially for multiplayer),
I love Alpha Centauri too, but it suffers from a few gameplay problems. Such as that the game is usually decided relativly early on in the tech tree (compared to other Civ games), yet there is a long road to the end... which is annoying. Plus I got a strong feeling it was suffering from feature overload, which explains some of the balance problems.
The social engineering system was slightly more interesting than the Civics one in some aspects, but on the other hand the Civics system made more sense as a replacement for the old "goverment" system of Civ I-III. I found out that as I got better, the civics was more balanced than I first thought.
I'm kinda bummed they got rid of city defection, because "my flavor" was that of cultural conquest.
No stack of doom: I am ambivalent on this one. Frankly, I never understood the huge uproar against the stack. If a player has the industrial muscle to build one, what whine is that of yours? Build your own stack of doom to counter it, or shut up and lose.
Hexes: I love that, and was eagerly awaiting for this feature to be implemented.
No religion: it's OK, I was never too fond of the way it was implemented, anyway. I understand why it was implemented the way it was, and why it was dropped - it's the good-ole political correctness at work. But, it's all fine, peace brother...
I just hope there still will be a "peaceful mode"-option to play the game, like there was for Civ IV.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I always loved the game but I could never fully enjoy it either. I probably just suck at it, but war is no fun if one phalanx obliterates half a dozen tanks. What do I invest in science for when my future technology is trumped by this bronze age unit?
I usually win by being first to colonize another world or by building the UN. But to have a chance at that, I need to set hostilities to a minimum... it's only half as much fun to play a castrated version of the game.
I think next time I'll invest a few hours to read some guides and tactics.
Not saying you should; but Civ and BfW are completely different games. If anything BfW is a lot like Panzer General, mentioned in the article as inspiration for some of the unit changes in Civ V. BfW is very unit focused but has no city management, technology, culture etc.
You could have asked why you should pay for it when you could get FreeCiv for free; and the obvious answer to that is more polish - whether it's worth $60 is a subjective issue.
What makes you think that the stats the unit carries doesn't already reflect "different types of units?"
What you are asking for is attribute customization via an ill placed stacking mechanic. The very same mechanic which so totally dominates human vs human civ4 play today because there is no alternative other than stack of doom vs stack of doom.
Consider this mechanic:
You have Warriors, and you have Swords. You can combine them, to make Swordsmen.
You have Warriors, and you have Horses. You can combine them, to make Horsemen.
You have Swordsmen and Horsemen. You can transfer the Horses to the Swordsmen, making a Knights unit and a Warriors unit.
See how silly your objection is? Your desire to have "different types" can easily be accounted for in other ways. The Knights units attributes can full account for the fact that it consists of Men + Swords + Horses.
"His name was James Damore."
I've often wondered if Civ would work if the subsequent branches of each option on the tech tree were semi-random. A different "universe" created for each game; you wouldn't know what lay ahead.
For example, is a universe technological or magical, with corresponding unit types. Do psychic powers exist in a particular universe, and how early are they discoverable. Genetic engineering, discovered early enough, affecting unit types. etc.
Every new game would be a "new game".
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
How will the one unit per hex effect worker units? I could imagine it getting very frustrating when you can't move your armies out of your cities because of the gaggle of worker units building stuff around it. Personally, I'd like to see them do away with workers altogether. I've been playing CtP 2 recently (thanks GOG.com) and I'm really liking the lack of busy work moving workers around. I also like the fact that I can create trade routes without having to painstakingly move caravan units around.
I have to agree Civ 4 wasn't a step forward.
But for me personally a top down 2D map is easier for tactical Civ type games.
An ideal mix, AFAIK, would be Civ III Conquest as the basis, Priest, Slavers, Future Techs and Space Combat from Civ Call to Power, and battles/combat like Rome Total War Gold/Barbarian invasion. A hex based map is nice. Alpha Centauri-style "design your own" units are nice.
But 3D only in the battles, not in the "worldview"-mode.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I just put in the Civ4 disk and lost three hours.
Wesnoth does not have ranged attacks in any reasonable sense of the term. Units must be adjacent to attack. Civ V adds the capability of ranged attacks between unengaged units.
That's not to say they do it well. Since when do archers fire over ponds and farmers' fields in order to hit city units? How far can these archers shoot? Somehow, that image bothers me.
In any case, I'm certainly not intending to disparage Wesnoth with my comments. Wesnoth is, as far as I've seen, the hands-down best totally original open-source strategy game out there. I'm also not trying to compliment Civ V, since I haven't played the commercial version of Civilization since Civ II.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
They didn't drop religion due to political correctness. They dropped it because it added nothing constructive to the gameplay - ironic, isn't it?
Well, if you're going to put princesses and swords, you might as well throw in religion. In what universe is a meter long "light-sabre" preferable to a handheld particle weapon?
So, then what you're saying is that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Just mod the game to produce grassland instead of desert for global warming. It's a quick change in the xml config.
religious people in the far flung future, seriously?
Yeah, it's not like they ever put religion in sci-fi, young padawan
GP did say *future*. Star Wars was a long time ago.
Yeah, and it doesn't take a Kwisatz Haderach to foresee that religion will be around for a long time...
I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri.
I haven't played the newer Civ games, but Alpha Centauri was so full of awesome that I don't find that hard to believe. And you're right, it wasn't about the tactics. Being able to build your own units was cool, but what made it a great game was the narrative. There was a real sense of different, evolving cultures fighting for the soul of the planet. In my experience, what made playing Civilization so enjoyable wasn't just the conquest strategy, it was the sense of playing out history. Alpha Centauri got that right. If the rest of the Civ franchise hasn't, they may be fun games, but they won't be anything special.
KTHXBYE
With a design that produces a beam slightly wider than a light saber.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
"Advanced" is a rather subjective term for games. Dwarf fortress (DO IT!) is a revolutionary game due to it's depth. It is a civ-like game that drills down to the individual left-pinky finger that holds the gem-encrusted ring (that menaces with spikes of iron) which makes the noble dwarf more confident in his finances so he drives a harder bargain bartering for the weapons traded to the Elves which ultimately causes their raid on the orc stronghold to fail and changes the political currents of the region.
DEPTH.
CPU crushing depth. Even if it dealt with mutli-cores better, it still wouldn't skip right along.
I agree, there is some rabid, extremist atheists. Though their theist counterparts FAR out number them, and have far more influence on the world. I find the religious fundamentalists a far larger threat than any degree of atheist.
I'm a pretty firm atheist, and I generally have no problem with religion, or any other ideology. Until they start trying to control people's lives, or start harming people. At that point the ideology in question should be destroyed. Just because your a Christian (or Muslim, or whatnot) doesn't mean EVERYONE should have to follow your silly arbitrary rules.
Atheists, for the most part, are immune to this tyrannical craziness. What are they going to do, stand on street corners screaming "THINK FOR YOURSELF!", or trying to force all children to learn science. The horror.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I have no clue if you're serious or not. There are about a billion games that meet your requirements, so I suppose by your logic they're all Wesnoth clones. Of course, since Wesnoth itself is a clone of the Warlords series of games, maybe you should just shut your trap, eh?
And if I got trolled-- sorry all.
Comment of the year
Oh no! There's something disturbing in the dystopian future!
SMAC is a game. Sometimes you want to grab your opponents by the lapel and shout in their face, "You idiot, quit being difficult and let's just cooperate," but if they actually did that, it would be a boring game. Fortunately, people don't all get along. They're divided by economic ideals, ecological ideals, civic ideals, etc. Why not religion? Religion is a great divider. I don't want to know what kind of people Miriam or Dierdre would be like if they weren't bat-shit insane; I like them how they are.
"For my money, I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri."
Seconded.
It's also the last game of its sort that allowed me to play the epic scale game I prefer: preposterously large maps and unreasonable amounts of cities. I enjoy that sort of gameplay, with very long-form games.
Every game since Civ 3 has seemed to make a mission out of forcing me to play a single-player game as if it were a multi-player game; short, small, and decisive. I wish the licensing for Alpha Centauri was such that it could have a proper sequel. But I also suspect they'd shrink it down for multiplayer expectations the way they did with Civ3 and Civ4.
I challenge your notion that "rabid atheists" are not religious fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is a state of being absolutely convinced that you're right, and everyone who doesn't agree is either evil or stupid. It doesn't have anything to do with what you're absolutely convinced about, just that you are. And the notion that "there is no god" is, of course, a notion about a religious matter.
No, they're going to demand that a religion/ideology "be destroyed". That, of course, demands torturing the adherents until they deconvert and killing those who refuse. Unless, of course, a reliable brainwashing technique to bring their beliefs closer to what you'll accept can be created.
The correct way to treat such people is to give them freedom and demand they give it to you too. This (Finland, and presumably United States as well) is a free country, where everyone is free to worship whatever deity he wishes, or none at all. I'll defend to death your right to choose freely. I'll also defend my right to not choose whatever you want. I'll also defend the rights of people I despise, because to not do so would be to do unto others what I wouldn't want to be done to myself
.
For the record, I'm a christian.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.