Sid Meier’s Civilization VI • Hacker News Board

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#101

Post by edem » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

anbende wrote: post #90

throwaway7767 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, a real successor to SMAC would be terrific. I liked Beyond Earth but it wasn't Alpha Centauri. I tried playing SMAC the other day but I had trouble adjusting myself to the dated interface, even though I spent so many hours playing it years back. I'd be happy with a remake of SMAC with the same gameplay but updated graphics and interface (especially the ability to give move orders that take several turns). No…

The atmosphere? Oh man, so good. I loved the little quotes in the descriptions of new technology. They got darker as the tech got higher up the tree. I still remember the gist of the one for human cloning: "She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock of her hair. She will be mine again..." Still gives me shivers.

    We sit together the mountain and I. Until only the mountain remains...

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#102

Post by eropple » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #88

jbmorgado wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that just plays basically as a Civ IV scenario, not a real Colonization game. Perhaps it's because my introduction to the Civ series was made by the original Colonization, but for me that will always be the most addicting of all the Civ series.

I don't think it's fair to call the original Colonization a Civ, it was a completely different 4X with its own principle and gameplay. I liked it because it played much more tactically than Civ, with much more micro-management of individual colonies, and way more interesting interactions with non-civ players (native tribes) Sadly that style doesn't seem to have been pursued much, or if it was I missed those, the 4X I…

It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. The economics of the game are really cool, but balancing that against other players or modern-quality AIs (the AIs in the original are basically nonfunctional) is a tricky task. I think the focus on making 4X games into multiplayer experiences is kind of suboptimal, but I think that's also what the playerbase seems to want.

Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game, in that doing it justice is really difficult. Like, in retrospect, while I dearly love the game, Colonization is deeply problematic in the worldview it pushes (while the manual for the game is notable in being pretty up-front about the shitty behaviors of the colonial powers, the game itself plays as straight as "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue") and I think, in order to ethically create a similar game, you have to challenge the default assumptions a lot more. And that's a really tough line to walk: on one hand, you do want to make it possible to dispace and wage war on the natives, because that happened, but that comes with its own ethical problems that I don't think a game is very good at exploring (and yet I feel needs to explore in order to treat the historical topic appropriately). The only nod in Col to the general shittiness of European colonial powers in the New World was a score penalty when you burned native villages, and that's not nothing, but it also isn't a lot given the game they were working with.

The best idea I came up with was the synthesis of a fake Wikipedia article after the end of the game, but that's going to be more of a lecture after-the-fact than a conscious exploration of player decisions as they progressed.

It's a really, really hard one to tackle. I'd love to take another crack at it someday.

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#103

Post by vatotemking » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 5:22 AM UTC

edem wrote: post #101

anbende wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The atmosphere? Oh man, so good. I loved the little quotes in the descriptions of new technology. They got darker as the tech got higher up the tree. I still remember the gist of the one for human cloning: "She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock of her hair. She will be mine again..." Still gives me shivers.

We sit together the mountain and I. Until only the mountain remains...

    But once, we were here.

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#104

Post by masklinn » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 10:27 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #102

masklinn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to call the original Colonization a Civ, it was a completely different 4X with its own principle and gameplay. I liked it because it played much more tactically than Civ, with much more micro-management of individual colonies, and way more interesting interactions with non-civ players (native tribes) Sadly that style doesn't seem to have been pursued much, or if it was I missed those, the 4X I…

It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. The economics of the game are really cool, but balancing that against other players or modern-quality…

> It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment.

Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care.

> Also, the topic itself is kind of messed up for a video game

The topic is a side-issue, you could make a similar micro/tactical 4X with a completely different settings, it's not like all 4X have the same premises. Hell, not even all Civs have the same premise (if you consider Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth Civs anyway)

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#105

Post by eropple » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #104

eropple wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. The economics of the game are really cool, but balancing that against other players or modern-quality…

> It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care. > Also, the topic itself is k…

You totally could attach it to a different setting, but figuring out that setting is in itself tricky! Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense. So I think you could make a more micromanagement-focused 4X, but I don't think you could really learn too many lessons beyond the very general ones from Col in the process just because so many of the game concepts are so tightly tied to the historical context around it. (That's huge, huge praise for Col, btw. It uses its setting to inform game features, not to merely dress them up in the way that, say, Civ does.)

For another example of a game that sort of falls down when it becomes so unmoored from something we recognize as reality, I'd like to suggest Pandora: First Contact. In addition to just not being a super-great game, I feel like the fact that it relies on transposing "familiar" concepts to an unfamiliar environment and just totally falls over in the process. Ditto Beyond Earth. Alpha Centauri actively doesn't do that, but it was also designed by Brian Reynolds and he's a rather sharp individual. =)

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#106

Post by anbende » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

grotsnot wrote: post #91

anbende wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The atmosphere? Oh man, so good. I loved the little quotes in the descriptions of new technology. They got darker as the tech got higher up the tree. I still remember the gist of the one for human cloning: "She's gone. She said she wants nothing more to do with me. But I saved a lock of her hair. She will be mine again..." Still gives me shivers.

That's... not entirely accurate: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri#P... (2nd one for Peacekeepers) I loved my chosen. How then to face the day when she left me? So I took from her body a single cell, perhaps to love her again. Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Time of Bereavement" I didn't consider until now that it might be a little ambiguous, but I'm pretty sure the implication is not that Lal's ch…

Thanks. I guess it's gotten a little more twisted in my memory over the years.

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#107

Post by masklinn » Sun, Oct 23, 2016, 11:06 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #105

masklinn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a difficult style of 4X to build (I've tried, it's probably my favorite Meier 4X title). In particular, I think it's almost untenable for a multiplayer-focused title, which most 4X games tend to be these days; I don't think the flow of it, that level of micro, really works in a hotseat or concurrent environment. Makes sense. I only play solo 4X so I don't really see that, or care. > Also, the topic itself is k…

You totally could attach it to a different setting, but figuring out that setting is in itself tricky! Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your gu…

> Like, I think a bunch of the military dynamic in the game is tied to the pseudohistoricity of it. While it isn't strictly historically accurate that, for example, dragoons devolve into soldiers when defeated, there's a certain amount of concreteness to the concepts involved (okay, you lose your horses before your guns) that makes a lot of sense.

Sure but I don't think that's a very important/interesting part of Col, and you could always have that with mounted or mechanised units in other settings. The most interesting parts of Colonisation to me were the management of cities, their very specific resources, the colonists/workers and their specialisations, and the necessary setup of trade/exchange links (both with AI and between your own colonies as you might have raw resource cities which are not amenable to extension and processing, so you'd have a small colony producing a ton of e.g. tobacco or sugar — either directly or through native allies — and a bigger one processing them into cigars).

The big sticking point I think would be Col's early reliance on the "mother nation" for economic needs (selling goods, raw materials and new colonists).

Re: Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

#108

Post by Can_Not » Mon, Oct 24, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

smallnamespace wrote: post #55

throwaway7767 wrote: post #35

Just started this yesterday. I like some of the new mechanics, multi-tile cities especially. That AI though... declares war on you for no reason. In my first game, five AI players decided to declare war on me out of the blue within the space of three turns. This was in the early game and there was no obvious reason for it. Some of them didn't even border me, and I was no military threat at that time. In the second ga…

Is it possible you ran headlong into the new civ agenda system? http://civ6.gamepedia.com/Leader_Agendas https://civilization.com/news/entries/diplomacy-gets-a-major... Also, some previous versions of civ make AIs generally dislike civs that are at war, scaling with the number of wars, leading sometimes to a 'pile on' effect.

> AIs generally dislike civs that are at war

That's the problem. It's like the devs saw "zero tolerance" in US schools and said "what a great idea for a diplomacy system!" Nobody wants that!

If an AI settles too close to my city and I declare war, other civs should be willing to acknowledge fault in the offending civ. Casus Belli is important! I don't want to manipulate/game edge-case bugs to get ahead of the AIs, I want functioning and rational relationships. Begging for gifts and friendship betrayals should be a possible surprise, not a "will happen every 30 turns guaranteed". It's not fun, might as well play a regular wargame.