111–120 of 224 posts
Is there some way one could play Civ 1 again?
I got stuck playing a few turns! it has many games including the Civ I for mac from my childhood. It has some file transfer capacity, not sure if it works well to save progress... mostly a curiosity!
Civ needs to be moddable and they can get a little percentage of every mod sale. Then this franchise will be actually good rather than something people play for a week or two and forget about. I want an invention tree that's thousands of items long based on actual human history, not an invention tree that's optimized for what a 15 year old will find 'fun' within the first week of play. Civ is an unfortunate lost oppo…
Europe Universalis is the one that made me actually want to learn history more. Civ was just a game with some historical names attached to units and buildings in comparison.
Did Civ6 end up being good? Civ games usually only beat their predecessors once the last expansion comes out. I stopped playing 6 after the climate change DLC. Was pretty underwhelmed. Has it matured now like 5 did?
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Districts mechanics is great, I can’t imagine going back to the old everything in city center model. Loyalty mechanics is a mixed blessing, after so many years I can’t say whether I like it or not. I find climate mechanics a nice yet minor addition. AI is crappy as ever. But since you only stopped playing after Gathering Storms you should already know what I said above; the game hasn’t changed much since, even one ma…
I find district mechanics as implemented to be too much of a micro-optimizing puzzle game, especially once you get to late game tech. Make a single mistaken placement early on in city development, and you can block yourself off from important wonders or buildings in that city.
Couple that with an incredibly hostile UX for new/non-expert players and the massive time commitment, and the experience is one of frustration rather thay joy & escapism.
It's like work, but you just get the pain of failures and none of the rewards.
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The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't. This is true in many games but especially Civilization, where we rely on the AI behaving predictably to feel mastery over the environment, and for diplomacy to feel "fair". If the AI were playing to win, diplomacy would mostly evaporate as a game system. It'd break the fiction of the game.
That's what the developers say, but I think it's part true and part a cop out. The AI in Civ 5 & 6 is just so so bad, that it's only challenging when you play on the really hard modes that gives them all sorts of cheats. And then it's a bit less fun because you're walking the line between impossible because of the cheating and having to essentially exploit the AI because of the cheating. I don't necessarily want an A…
The problem is AI for complex games like that is absurdly hard to develop. The combinatorial complexity of a game like Axis & Allies is something like a hundred orders of magnitude greater than chess. It’s probably similar with Civ, probably a lot more so.
But aside from just competency, what makes playing humans so compelling is personality. Human players range the full spectrum from terrible to excellent, but even beyond that they vary massively in the ways they are terrible, and the ways in which they are excellent. With A&AOL there are top tiered players that employ radically different strategies, to great effect.
I bought the original when it came out and, together with Master of Orion, it ate so much of my life that it added a year to my time at university. Since then I've bought every new Civ as it came out and maybe played through two or three games before abandoning it. None of them capture the original, but rather just add more and different crap to micromanage. They're just not fun. The big exception is Alpha Centauri,…
Those "crap" to micromenege are the different aspects brought in that form essential context of a civilization left out before, all thing like commerce, culture, religion are of an essence normally but left out due to simplifications before. Yes, they make the game complex for some and takes time learning how those affect the outcome and how to find the balance in a particular situation (geography, civ characteristics, opponents, mistakes made earlier, etc.) but it very well worths the effor in each, it is a good game tinkering with aspects other than how to hit opponents hard, leveraging other characteristings than pure power.
Not all changes are welcome by me either throughout the years, the top view of 1 is well enough for this game, the video card eating cirlcling seagulls over fishing boats in 3D are a bad joke, laughable, and all such like animated time delaying combats, waste of efforts for superficial nothings bloating the game unnecessarily. Not all aspects work too well either, like spying in 5, could use some improvements.
All changes brought in some good and interesting. And it is good if can turn off some if you feel so (and one can).
I stopped at 5. The 6 I found just weird (probably feeling the same like you did with all after the 1). Going back to 1 is sooo booring now!
Will be curious what the 7 brings, but cautiously, first looking at gameplay of others, not buying if it is obviously not my cup of tea.
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A good AI shouldn't need to know any more about the global map than a human player would in the same situation. If they made it see the whole map, it's basically cheating.
In general with strategy game AIs it’s not feasible to make it play at decent human level, so the way they make it challenging to play is by cheating in various ways. Resource boosts, global vision, etc. In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it…
Which is why the parent of the entire chain mentioned the advances in AI.
Lately I've been playing Humankind and really enjoying it. You have epic battles involving land, air and sea units. You choose a wonder and have to finish it before choosing another.
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In general with strategy game AIs it’s not feasible to make it play at decent human level, so the way they make it challenging to play is by cheating in various ways. Resource boosts, global vision, etc. In particular, humans are very good at reasoning based on limited information. We can form hypotheses about where resources or objectives might be, or if an enemy unit goes out if the visible map, estimating where it…
>That sort of thing is extremely hard to program Which is why the parent of the entire chain mentioned the advances in AI.
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Thats actually a great idea. Imagine actually being able to talk Ghandi down from nuking everyone!
I read an interview a while back with a game developer who was asked why video games have historically had so much fighting and he responded with "it's easy to write." Take away is that as AI improves we will move to a world where conflict in video games will be very different - your example but also imagine being able to actually have to argue/convince characters in games using free form speech.
Another huge problem is the extremely questionable affordances in free form speech. Here's an NPC, go talk to them. But about what? Maybe they drop clues. But what if the player doesn't pick them up, or they're distracted and aren't paying attention, or it's been 2 weeks between play sessions and what was this guy's deal again?