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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."
I'm glad they got rid of religion. Hopefully we can get rid of it in this world too.
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.
You want nations that don't cheat on diplomacy?
If we're going to abandon reality, why don't we just add wizard units and inter-dimensional portals too?
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
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.
..the only problem is, the civ4 stacks of doom arrive thousands of years before aircraft are invented.
It isnt until airships that the stacks of doom start their decline in importance, because prior to that it only takes a few forward units to shield the stack.
The hardest early counter mechanic to stacks of doom would be unit upkeep cost (stacks are expensive), but thanks to the specialist mechanics, early warmongers simply chop out libraries, temples, and markets and run a specialist economy for research and money. Money isnt a problem when you can set your research slider at 0% and still keep up on techs.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
What I would like to see is probably the game being more clear with what each difficulty actually means. Probably would be over the head of most people, but at least marking how much advantage you get vs computer. Other than knowing that me and the AI is on equal footing at noble difficulty... it's not really as clear it could be in Civ IV. :)
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 :)
You're right for most people, they probably don't care, which is why the Game presents it in basic terms.
But, if you're on of the ones that truly cares, all of that information is in plain text format (marked up in XML) in the /Assets/XML/GameInfo directory. (You can even change it if you want).
The file that addresses the changes in difficulty specifically is: CIV4HandicapInfo.xml
But also realize that some of these factors are also modified based on world size, and turn speed as well. (Possibly some other things that I've forgotten as well).
I know Civ3 and Alpha Centauri had similar files, and If I remember correctly, I beleive even Civ2 stored all of this information in text files that could be modified.
Which is one of the reasons that the various Civ's have always been so modable.
I just put in the Civ4 disk and lost three hours.