Civilization V Catch-All

Thin_J wrote:

I can't be 100% sure, but I think that might be the first negative word I've ever seen written about Civ IV.

There's a small minority who seems to strongly prefer the Civ III systems to those in Civ IV. Though I'd be curious as to what specific complaints mcdonis has, as it's always intriguing to me when I see something like this that's in stark contrast to the majority opinion.

I just like that we have a community where mcdonis isn't being drawn and quartered for having a differing opinion to the majority, I too would be interested in his reasoning though.

Prozac wrote:

I just like that we have a community where mcdonis isn't being drawn and quartered for having a differing opinion to the majority, I too would be interested in his reasoning though.

*Hedgewizard frowns, and puts down the traces for the four horses he was preparing for the event*

Okay, now I have to buy this on day one. The release date is literally a week after my birthday, and I've already requested that week off for birthday festivities (and recovery from the Monterey Jazz Festival). The only question for me now will be if I get myself a new gaming rig to play it on.

The release date is my birthday

HedgeWizard wrote:
Prozac wrote:

I just like that we have a community where mcdonis isn't being drawn and quartered for having a differing opinion to the majority, I too would be interested in his reasoning though.

*Hedgewizard frowns, and puts down the traces for the four horses he was preparing for the event*

Yeah, sometimes the standards set by this community can be a real downer.

Yonder wrote:

The release date is my birthday :D

Internet hi-five!

Prozac wrote:

I just like that we have a community where mcdonis isn't being drawn and quartered for having a differing opinion to the majority, I too would be interested in his reasoning though.

I already killed him. That's why he hasn't replied yet.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Prozac wrote:

I just like that we have a community where mcdonis isn't being drawn and quartered for having a differing opinion to the majority, I too would be interested in his reasoning though.

I already killed him. That's why he hasn't replied yet.

And why am I stuck burying the body parts again. It's someone else's turn!

Definitely a wait-and-see for me. I love Civ4 and Advance Wars, but every time I see "it's like Advance Wars" used to describe the units and combat in Civ5, I die a little inside.

I still have hope that it will be a good game and worthy successor, I'm just not willing to gamble $50 on it.

syndicatedragon wrote:

I love Civ4 and Advance Wars, but every time I see "it's like Advance Wars" used to describe the units and combat in Civ5, I cheer a little inside.

I was looking for a new stratagy game and have never gotten in to the civilization series. Would this release be a good time? I have played a lot of age of empires and Rise of nations, how similar are these?

At the end of the latest Weekend Confirm they talk about Civ 5 for about 5 plus mins and it made me drool. It's around the 2:05 mark. Jeff said it was his game of the show and Brian said it was 2nd place behind rock band 3.

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredart...

XGeneral_ChaozX wrote:

I was looking for a new stratagy game and have never gotten in to the civilization series. Would this release be a good time? I have played a lot of age of empires and Rise of nations, how similar are these?

I believe rise of nations and Empires are both RTS. Civ is turn based. That should matter though. I find it hard for a fan of strategy games not enjoying Civ. I wouldn't wait for Civ 5. I would suggest you pick up Civ 4 complete. There are usually deals for it regularly if you don't want to pay the $40 for it, though it's totally worth $40.

billt721 wrote:
Thin_J wrote:

I can't be 100% sure, but I think that might be the first negative word I've ever seen written about Civ IV.

There's a small minority who seems to strongly prefer the Civ III systems to those in Civ IV. Though I'd be curious as to what specific complaints mcdonis has, as it's always intriguing to me when I see something like this that's in stark contrast to the majority opinion.

I am one of those weirdos that preview Civ III. I'm just assuming that it is due to that being the first version of the game I have played. I've messed around with Civ IV, but it has yet to be the kind of time sink Civ III was for me. But I've noticed that there were ton of people that didn't care for III, and IV was kind of billed as a return to form.

Personally, though, V looks pretty awesome. I'm very anxious to give it a spin.

This video is pretty good to see some actual gameplay in action.

My biggest pick up is that it looks like there are a lot more instances of regular combat not resulting in either side's death. Seems that they either upped the withdraw chance across the board under the old system or have some entirely new mechanism for computing battle outcomes. Very good in my book.

Gunner wrote:

This video is pretty good to see some actual gameplay in action.

Panzer General & Civ 5 in the same sentence... *faint*

I liked the advanced wars combat mechanic. It's more realistic (in some ways) than the original Civ system.

Gunner wrote:

My biggest pick up is that it looks like there are a lot more instances of regular combat not resulting in either side's death. Seems that they either upped the withdraw chance across the board under the old system or have some entirely new mechanism for computing battle outcomes. Very good in my book.

It's relatively rare in most cases for people to fight to the death if they're not cornered or completely out gunned.

Queueball wrote:

It's relatively rare in most cases for people to fight to the death if they're not cornered or completely out gunned.

Exactly. Its always been a problem with the Civ combat model in my mind.

XGeneral_ChaozX wrote:

I was looking for a new stratagy game and have never gotten in to the civilization series. Would this release be a good time? I have played a lot of age of empires and Rise of nations, how similar are these?

Not very similar. Civilization is a turn based game as opposed to real time. The focus of the game isn't combat, it's only part of it. You have to build a nation over the course of 6000+ years. There are a multitude of factors that you must consider such as your economy, military, foreign relations, technology research, cultural influence, happiness, food, production, etc. There are multiple paths to winning - whether winning a diplomatic election, conquering the world, or being the first to land a space shuttle on a foreign planet (basically a tech+production win). It's really hard to explain without playing, but I'm sure there are good wikis out there that explain better than I can.

Oh, the description I gave is mostly for Civ IV, but these are the things that make it a Civ game so I doubt they will change too much.

Gunner wrote:

This video is pretty good to see some actual gameplay in action.

My biggest pick up is that it looks like there are a lot more instances of regular combat not resulting in either side's death. Seems that they either upped the withdraw chance across the board under the old system or have some entirely new mechanism for computing battle outcomes. Very good in my book.

The combat system is completely different, pretty much. Hence the "Panzer General" mentions. There's no stacking, although units can support nearby units and some can attack at a short distance. Somewhere I heard stated that they wanted units to live longer, hence stuff not dying off--simplistically: they each do damage to each other based on their relative strengths, and often that won't be enough damage to kill either one off.

Sinkwater wrote:

The focus of the game isn't combat, it's only part of it. You have to build a nation over the course of 6000+ years. There are a multitude of factors that you must consider such as your economy, military, foreign relations, technology research, cultural influence, happiness, food, production, etc. There are multiple paths to winning - whether winning a diplomatic election, conquering the world, or being the first to land a space shuttle on a foreign planet (basically a tech+production win). It's really hard to explain without playing, but I'm sure there are good wikis out there that explain better than I can.

Oh, the description I gave is mostly for Civ IV, but these are the things that make it a Civ game so I doubt they will change too much.

Diplomatic Elections and Cultural Influence were new in Civ III, but the rest of those things you mentioned have been staples since the original Civilization, so I'd imagine your description is going to be fairly accurate.

The key difference between Civ and AoE/RoN and the like is that Civ is turn-based instead of real-time. You still have to do things like balance production with economy, and military with research, but armies are generally quite a bit smaller and battles more strategic. It can be pretty confusing when you first get into it, because there's a lot more to take in - city growth, what stuff is made by what tiles, resources, trade routes, specialists, and much more. Once you really understand what's going on, though, it can be a far more involved game. Of course, once you get into it, a typical game can take hours upon hours to finish...

Amusing trailer.

"That's too many erections"

Am I the only one disturbed by the Steam Deluxe Edition? You pay extra to get the Babylonians (along with a few other goodies). Sounds like withholding content to me.

Queueball wrote:

Amusing trailer.

"That's too many erections"

The Sid Meier cameo in the end is pretty hilarious.

PyromanFO wrote:

The Sid Meier cameo in the end is pretty hilarious.

Yep. I also liked the poster of Sid's face painted like Joker from Dark Knight.

So I was thinking about the new ranged units, and how it was weird that bowmen, trebuchets, mobile artillery, and battleships will all have the same range (as far as we've seen). I was thinking of how I would try to get around this and came up with (IMO) a pretty neat idea. The simplest way to fix it would just be to give those later units a really huge range, but I think that those larger ranges and movespeeds would start to feel a little strange and hectic within the turnbased movement environment.

What if, instead of that, we tried for an organic scaling of the map, a la Spore? What if at key points (say Iron Age, Renaissance, Industrial, and Modern) your map changed so that the grids now had twice the length? Each of the new grids would now take up approximately four of the old grid points. What was once considered a bustling town of three hexes is now a below-average town for the time period (maybe the city menu would show sub-hexes if that was important for how the city was managed).

The change wouldn't be world wide, it would only be for you, the new armies that you built would appear to your enemies in the last tech level to be large, four-hex blobs, while looking at a cluster of his troops (say two riflemen with a cannon behind them) the high tech guy would see one 3/4 strength mixed arms unit. When attacking he would have to engage all three of your units at once.

I think that it even scales up pretty well across two divides. An early- Renaissance division was around 1000 men, while a modern one is 15k to 20k. Having a single unit occupy and fight in a space around 16 times bigger seems about right.

While it seems like this method isn't that different than just increasing the later units strength, speed, and range more, I think that in play it would work out to be a lot different. Your slow units would always move 1-2 squares, your close-in units would always attack adjacent to them, etc. I also think there is a psychological difference between your units starting to move twice as fast, and instead displaying that next city as being half as far away.

....HEXES!!!

Yonder wrote:

{... stuff about scale weirdness ...}

The way I look at it: it's a very abstract view, no matter what you do. I think the easiest way to reconcile it with reality is to look at the difference between force multipliers and increased vectors of attack.

Melee units appear to be able to support each other by providing force multipliers--think of this as easing of supply, less need for the ground force to divide its forces to cover flanks, etc. Friendlies are there, so they can cover for us. However, that doesn't prevent the ground forces from actually having to engage the enemy forces at close range. Enemy ground forces, in particular, always have the capability to fight back and cause damage of their own--there's no way to prevent it.

Ranged units, on the other hand, have a completely different *means* of attacking, one which does not allow melee units to respond in kind. Either there's a friendly melee army in the way (preventing direct engagement), or there's space between (representing the ability of the ranged units to harass from a distance and refuse to engage).

Thus the real distinction is the inability of a melee force to directly respond. I do wonder whether it will be possible for some forces (cavalry, for example), to advance across empty terrain to counter-attack against enemy ranged units that aren't defended by a ground army or some sort of terrain feature in between.

It's also worth noting that in a way (assuming this Civ works like previous Civs in this way), the map *is* already "scrunching up" as time goes on. Not through changing the actual scale of the map, but by changing the scale of *time*. In earlier ages, think of the archers as circulating through the hex in front of them as the fighting is going on. In later ages, artillery is probably just able to shoot that far.

Still--trying to map it to reality is really hoping for too much. Civ isn't really a war game. This new combat system has the potential to make the military strategy side of the equation a more vibrant part of the game (actually holding territory instead of rolling around with Stacks of Doom), but it would be just as dangerous to add too much detail to it as to add too much to the socio-economic side of the game. (Why don't we model population growth in terms of birth rate, emigration rate, immigration rate, etc.? Answer: The designers of this game have a clear feeling about where to stop to avoid overloading the player. Other games--especially space 4X games--often have much more detailed models, and suffer from complaints of "playing spreadsheets" because of it. It's a valid kind of game, but it's clearly not where they want Civ to be.)

MeatMan wrote:
PyromanFO wrote:

The Sid Meier cameo in the end is pretty hilarious.

Yep. I also liked the poster of Sid's face painted like Joker from Dark Knight.

Sooooo many funny things in that trailer. I especially liked Edna... "and then I have to rain ICBMs on your Aztec arse" and "cause that's what you get when you're f***ing with Edna"

Hypatian wrote:
Yonder wrote:

{... stuff about scale weirdness ...}

etc.

I just think of it as more of a board game than a globe