TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
10hr ago
Yes, excellent analysis. Thanks for laying out exactly what I was thinking in such agreeable prose.
TitaniumButterfly
14hr ago
It's been a long time for me, but IIRC there was only the one map, and no real functionality for good random maps. So, same map, same factions, same locations every time. Is very limiting.
TitaniumButterfly
16hr ago
Just different genres. I for one like games where the player can end up in unrecoverable situations not due to reaction time, but poor decision-making.
TitaniumButterfly
16hr ago
Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.
I deny it. What is true is that in wars where the human player is the aggressor, there's often one decisive battle followed up by a slow roll over the now-mostly-defenseless territory. And so the tactical considerations for that battle are going to be minimized, in that they only need to be figured out once. I.e. a well-researched and -implemented invasion can accomplish a lot by choosing a favorable initial battlefield, yes.
Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.
Which is how Civ4 works, yes. Literally with artillery and bombing and the 'collateral damage' mechanic. Your units standing shoulder to shoulder will get absolutely shredded by AOE damage if you're not taking steps to prevent that, and first-line enemy defensive cities usually have multiple artillery units in them for this reason. Even the AI.
Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.
That's true of NuCiv, sure, but it's not true of Civ4.
TitaniumButterfly
17hr ago
Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass.
BTW, and I mention this sincerely, there's a 'move all' button that a lot of people seem to manage to miss.
TitaniumButterfly
17hr ago
Yeah, the complaint that IF you manage your nation well enough to invest in logistical infrastructure and research and production while hindering your opponents from doing the same, while navigating politics and making the best of the (inevitably awful) start location you rolled, and put a lot of thought into sophisticated combined-arms deployments while spinning a whole bunch of other absolutely-vital plates and taking care to avoid getting penned in and AOE-wrecked—
That IF you do all that, you're more likely to win than they are—
Well, it just doesn't strike me as credible. And neither do the people who make such a complaint. And somehow I'm sure that this is a window onto what is basically wrong with the world, and why democracy needs to be acknowledged as the hideous mistake it was.
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
Yeah, clicking on heads is fine, it's just not my thing.
Also, my thing is better.
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.
Very good! But, bad replay value. And I still don't know why we haven't had a remake.
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
Yeah, the stakes here are low enough that any principled objection I could (and would) make would obviously be silly.
But since I apparently felt like dying on this hill today (defensive bonus btw) I'll superciliously argue that the analog here would be 'clicking on heads' instead of 'head shot'.
In fact there are games where head shots include a lot of setup, deep thought, consideration of range and windage, etc. plus a whole bunch of skill, and conflating that with 'click on head' is inappropriate.
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
Man, you occur to me as being like one of those guys who complains about 'capitalism' and then when someone tries to dig down into what you mean, it turns out you're actually just describing reality.
It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.
Well, first of all, all else being equal, isn't that exactly how it should work? And if a game were indeed that simple, and someone were still complaining about it, my analysis wouldn't be that it's a bad game, it's that either he doesn't care for it (valid) or he simply sucks at it and is whinging to cover for his wounded pride (invalid).
But this doesn't describe Civ4 at all.
A lot of things can come into play to add depth and complexity to a (realistic) system wherein, all else being equal, the side with more units wins. Including but not limited to:
- Terrain modifiers such as hills or forests being more defensible
- Penalties to, e.g., attacking amphibiously or across rivers
- More than one enemy such that throwing one's forces at A leaves one vulnerable to B
- Logistical challenges in coordinating a united attack
- Economic difficulties in even fielding and supplying a force above a certain size
- General homefield advantages favoring the defender
- Area of effect damage to discourage clumping
- Diversity of units such that some are strong or weak against certain other types
- Ability to specialize/promote units such that they can surprise or circumvent the dynamic from the previous item
- Sheer potential to tech up and field fewer superior units over more (but inferior) ones
- Diplomacy to allow for multiple weaker players to collectively outweigh individual stronger ones
- Additional layers of combat e.g. air or naval superiority which can radically shift the balance of power in the 'main' (in this case, ground) layer
- Espionage/intelligence systems to allow for seeing/delaying enemy deployments to counter them in time
- Some element of randomized results such that surprise upsets can and do occur
And you'll notice that not only does Civ4 do all of these things, but I could jump into any of those items and talk more about additional complexity within them to make it even more interesting and fun.
So, in summary, the complaint that Civ4 has a 'death stack' problem is, by your own definition, entirely invalid. Therefore I conclude that you have no basis upon which to call it a bad game, only that you personally don't care for it.
(...Or.)
TitaniumButterfly
20hr ago
Yeah I also play biggest map/marathon and find it sad that so little theory has been written on that playstyle. It's the only thing that even remotely captures the vibe of Civ2 which I loved so well.
I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.
Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.
Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!
According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.
You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.
Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.
And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of death stacks armies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.
Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!
When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.
Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.
Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.
Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.
Yeah -- not what I was asking about. The question is why it's sad that there are patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues. To me this implies some 'ought'-style thinking that I can neither model nor understand. Should cultures or people all be identical? If not, doesn't that imply differences? Is the sentiment of the person to whom I was responding merely a reflexive genuflection toward prevailing political ideology, or did he mean something else by it?
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.
Why is it sad?
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Second.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
I have surprisingly few feelings about the object level discussion here, but why must you impugn the good name of vanilla?
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
They're mostly Germans and Italians with some Iberians thrown in.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
Mayonnaise is not traditionally made with seed oils. Olive oil is traditional. The modern stuff is basically just a big canister of canola but there's no reason it should be so.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
I think I'm in camp "If the robots can take over earth they can and will probably get to Mars too." Guess one never does know.
IIRC a novel called 'Moving Mars' deals with such a scenario.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Right, I just said so elsewhere in this thread. Btw food stockpiles are good but the ability to grow more is a much bigger deal. No telling how long that winter will last.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Probably better to have our eggs in more than one basket and no one else was making that one happen.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
It's true that designing some kind of vault system to survive a meteor strike would be vastly easier and cheaper than trying to do something similar on another world. At least here we have air and water, and transportation costs are comparatively nil.
TitaniumButterfly
6d ago
Grats!
TitaniumButterfly
7d ago
Scott dismisses a Platonist account of aesthetic quality due to concerns about the observed variance in aesthetic preferences across individuals.
I'd like to respond to your take on the undesirability of Platonist aesthetic theory, but probably won't. It seems hard and I'm detecting a lot of places where we don't see eye to eye.
But I don't understand Scott's brief dismissal of the idea (and yes I read TFA). I adhere to what we can probably call a Platonist view, and to me the solution is simple: mankind is in the process of developing attunement to 'true' beauty etc. Just as at one point we had an ancestor which could not see at all, then eventually one which could see dimly, then one fairly well, then one in color, and so on.
It can be simultaneously the case that Beauty is universal and that people will disagree on what it looks like. Also, I find that a lot of the 'disagreement' goes away once we factor in fashion, signaling, obvious reaction and inversion, etc. And a lot of disagreement about aesthetics seems to come down to trained nostalgia and association, e.g., houses built like my grandparents' soothe and please me even though I don't think they're necessarily objectively better.
Still I hold that there is such a thing as objectively better. We just can't see it perfectly yet. The interesting question is whether advancements in such perception are adaptive. Does a people which perceives and cultivates True Beauty(tm) outcompete one which does not?
Toxoplasma quotient counterintuitively low.
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