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Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

polygon.com

131–140 of 150 posts

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#132

I'm hoping they've made some changes towards making vertical expansion (focusing resources on developing a small number of large, advanced cities) a bit more of a viable alternative to horizontal expansion (focusing resources on founding as many cities as quickly as possible). In Civ5, with the former approach, city population growth eventually becomes unsustainable (as with fewer cities, you have access to fewer res…

IIRC, Vertical expansion has been improved and made more competitive in every Civ release starting with at least Civ III.

I agree. Venice was a very viable Civ to play as in V, and there you're only allowed one city.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#133

I love the Civilization series, but I'll be honest: it really bothers me that certain companies have one or two franchises and they keep churning out new iterations of them every year or every other year. It just feels like a money grab after a while (especially with franchises like Call of Duty or Madden, which, from my perspective, don't improve appreciably in between iterations). I'd like to see them taking some r…

On the flip side, I'd love to see other companies take on the historical strategy genre. I know there's Paradox, but nobody else seems to want to make a game that spans the entirety of human history.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#134
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Steam reports 3.57% of users running OS X in April [1]. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Low user numbers are something of a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's a bad port in the first place, though.

That number is not for Civ V specifically, it is across a random sample of Steam users.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's also hardly black and white No, I think it's clear. The Russians invaded another country, conquered Ukranian land and kidnapped Ukrainian people. EDIT: Fixed the ambiguous pronouns

> Their military invaded "Their" being Russian here... > conquered their land and kidnapped their people By 'their', you mean the people of Crimea, of which over 50% identify as Russians?

Under that logic, the 87% Hispanic population of Texas's 15th and 34th congressional districts ought to welcome the Mexican army.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#136

I've bought every Civilization game except the very first one. They're good games, but the one I really love is Alpha Centauri. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing--- I got SMAC when I was in middle school. But the faction design was phenomenal, and it was great how you actually had to play the factions differently, and knowing the other factions meant you handled them differently. I started playing University of Planet and…

Here's a blog (that I found from an HN comment, interestingly!) where someone goes through and analyzes all the SMAC flavor text and writes about how well-done it was. It was interesting for me because there's a lot more depth than I realized when I first played SMAC, and the different factions all seemed to me more like caricatures than real philosophical viewpoints: https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com

That's an amazing series. I miss Alpha Centauri all the more, and the disappointment of BE is that much harsher.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pretty entertaining. I think I want to see if I can get this game now.

It's on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri and I was even able to play it on OSX--- GOG has packaged it with a Windows VM.

Furthermore, there are a series of community patches that improve the game in a number of ways, such as making it properly work in windowed mode in Windows, and give you smooth zoom:

http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=14308.0

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not only OSX/Linux, the Windows version is a bit embarrassing with its performance and graphics glitches too. I really hope they're using a different game engine for this one. Civ5 late games with massive maps are very tedious to play even with a beefy gaming desktop.

I think the AI turns are quite CPU bound with the current engine, so I agree. Late game end turns take forever to complete.

Last time I profiled it, most of the execution was in vsprintf. I'm pretty sure the answer is just “nobody put time for that in the budget”, as with multiplayer support.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their military invaded "Their" being Russian here... > conquered their land and kidnapped their people By 'their', you mean the people of Crimea, of which over 50% identify as Russians?

Under that logic, the 87% Hispanic population of Texas's 15th and 34th congressional districts ought to welcome the Mexican army.

Don't forget cities like New York, with China Town, Crown Heights, etc. etc. etc. It's going to be a challenge to manage all those national borders in such a small area.

Re: Civilization 6 is coming in October, with big changes

#140
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civ 5 was arguably incomplete at launch. The optimal strategies ended up being pretty shallow and the AI was pretty brain dead. The expansions helped a lot (although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow), but BNW made it a little to easy to secure a culture victory IMHO.

> although Religion tends to feel like a sideshow Does it? One of my favourite tactics in Civ5 is rushing to pile up religious wonders, convert the crap out of other countries, and proceed to actually get decent trade deals with their leaders. Combined with Patronage and a few network-oriented beliefs, religious domination will let me lock-in complete support from all City-States (as long as goddamn Alexander isn't i…

Civ4 had more depth (with expansions) regarding alternative way to dominate (religious or commercial).
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