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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2250 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 16, 2024

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Civilization 7 gameplay footage in a few days on August 20th.

I only ever played 6 because I thought these games weren't for me. I tried to backtrack to 5 but never really felt it - I hate going back and playing older games.

Stoked for 7 though.

After seeing the gameplay today... I have serious concerns. I thought that the civ switching idea was neat when Humankind was announced, but in practice it made civs bland and boring. I am not enthusiastic about the idea of bringing that into Civ. Maybe Firaxis has figured out how to make it fun, but for now I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Civ seems to have been slowly devoured by various malign strategy game trends - a tendency to define the possibility of failure as "unfun", scripted events with 2-3 choices, and the cancer that is "perks", even beyond the intrusion of wokist tendencies. So I don't hold on to much hope. I think Civ 6 had some decent ideas with districts, but ended up being too board gamey.

As a longtime civ fan, I feel like it's been devoured by the common pitfall of "gamers will optimize the fun out of everything." original civ was great because you were literally building a civilization from the ground up, and you could do anything you wanted. But then gamers figured out the "optimal" way to play (either spamming settlers or spamming chariots), and it lost all fun. They added new game mechanics, while still trying to keep the feel of the old, but there's just no way to keep that old magic of playing by yourself on a DOS machine, when you can watch a youtube tutorial from a pro gamer telling you exactly how to beat the game and why you suck if you can't grind your way to a high multiplayer rank.

It seems to me like that is a self-imposed problem though. I don't go looking up Civ strategies and I have a great time with it.

I only ever played 6 because I thought these games weren't for me. I tried to backtrack to 5 but never really felt it - I hate going back and playing older games.

Civilization IV is usually considered the best in the series, for good reason. I strongly encourage you to try it. It's on Steam, and every once in a while it goes on sale for $6.

IV is amazing, but I've played it so damn much that every time I launch it, what issues it has just jump right into my face to scream "DOOMSTACKS WILL RUIN YOUR FUN AGAIN!".

Mods for IV are great, but again...the AI just can't keep up with many complex mechanics they add, and the UI can't keep up with the amount of added content, most of the time.

Civilization IV is usually considered the best in the series, for good reason. I strongly encourage you to try it. It's on Steam, and every once in a while it goes on sale for $6.

I very much second this recommendation, though I prefer the GOG version as it is DRM free and works a bit more seamlessly with mods. It pretty regularly goes on sale for $7.50.

Civ IV has some of the greatest history-simulation mods of any game I've encountered, starting with Rhye's and Fall of Civilization that came packaged with the final expansion pack (Beyond the Sword), with several still in active development (Dawn of Civilization, RFC Europe, and Sword of Islam). I've also heard rave reviews for an ancient history mod (Pie's Ancient Europe), as well as a dark fantasy RPG (Fall From Heaven) that somehow works seamlessly within the Civ4 engine.

The best is Alpha Centauri. Only not considered a Civilization game, because of copyright issues.

Alpha Centauri is awesome. But... it really isn't a a Civilization game. It felt more like a mod of Civ2, rather than a standalone game. It let you customize units how you want, customize the government, customize cities... really customize almost everything about the basic civ1/civ2 engine. But of course that let you push all the most imblanced things, and the AI couldn't keep up at all. It's not even single player, it's more like zero-player. Do whatever you want and see what happens.

That said, yes, awesome story. Very "90s" feel, where you could package an awesome sci-fi story into a video game. They should make a movie out of it!

Certainly the best in terms of writing. Could have been for gameplay, but even ignoring its age-related issues (mostly poor UX) it seems like a lot of potential was wasted by questionable balance and pacing and underpowered AI.

I mean... and also the little thing about how it's based on sci-fi rather than human history. Gives a very different feel.

Alpha Centauri has the best story, but it is still plagued by gameplay issues that weren't resolved until III and IV. For example, unit support is local rather than global, resulting in incredibly annoying micromanagement of each unit's home base. ICS is a viable strategy. And having to fuck around with the slider to allocate resources between energy, labs, and pysch is a pain in the ass compared to making gold the default and asking you what percentage of your income you want to allocate to research, what percentage to culture, and the rest just goes into the treasury.

What a plot, though. I still remember the first time I completed the Voice of Planet. Truly on par with the best science fiction novels ever written.

"Eternity lies ahead of us and behind. Have you drunk your fill?"

~ Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Planet", Epilogue

CW relevant:

The tragedy of Earth is not that so many died. Death is an inevitable part of life. The tragedy is that so many died as victims. When the crisis came, they were helpless, unable to use their deaths to buy anything of value. Millions of otherwise intelligent people had been tricked into ignoring a fundamental truth: that no man has any rights if he is unable to personally defend them. — Col. Corazon Santiago, "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"

and

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master.

And then there's every last quote from Yang. Giving a villain like him an ironclad philosophy is quite the achievement.

What a plot, though. I still remember the first time I completed the Voice of Planet. Truly on par with the best science fiction novels ever written.

Mary had a little lamb

Little lamb, little lamb

Mary had a little lamb

Whose fleece was white

as snow

--Assassins' Redoubt,

Final Transmission

How much further will it go into gay race communism?

I'm not even entertaining the thought of playing it on release because, in 2024, it'll likely come out as a buggy mess, and it'll take months of patches to put it in its intended release state. And that's assuming the Civ devs find sense not to require 2K account to play their game.

Was looking forward to it after the announcement that they're going to not have the 2k launcher... but then yesterday someone spotted on Steam that it's going to require a 2k account to play. So I'm back to not really caring. Wish companies would stop with hostile crap like that and just make games.

It's not weird that everybody else is slavering over Valve taking 30% of revenues for thousands of games on Steam. It is a little weird that nearly everybody else's solution to that is "make a Steam clone but it only works for our 8 games and it gets a proportionally small amount of love+maintenance", not "make a Steam clone open to everybody but just charge 20%". GOG is the only thing that seems to be even close to an alternative.

The newest Civ game without any hostile crap is 4, as both 5 and 6 have yet to release a DRM-free version on GOG. Hopefully when 7 launches, 5 gets on GOG.

4 is the last Civ I played and it ought to be the final.

even if it isn't a perfect solution; this is one of the reasons for why I shop for games in GOG almost exclusively.

Civ 4 was peak Civ for me. I miss unit stacking, and the live level editor was excellent as an addition to the sandbox, though I remember Civ 3's world editor just as fondly.

Never really got into 5, and 6, while initially addictive, ended up losing it's lustre when everything took so bloody long.

Something I'd love is having a small local LLM plan actions and personalities for the AI, I suppose it would add too much latency now to be worth it, but I look forward to future strategy games where the AI can be a worthy opponent while having more consistent "character" (say personality goals and agendas other than winning a game), since actual multi-player in Civ takes too damn long and is hard to organize.

Was 4 your first game in the series? No Civ out of 4, 5 and 6 recreated the magic of 2 and its clones and spinoffs (ToT, Freeciv, c-evo) for me, with the obvious theory being imprinting on whatever I experienced first.

III was my first and IV was definitely the apex of the series.

recreated the magic of 2

As far as I know, neither of the first two games seems to be available on Steam. Are they (legitimately, I guess) available anywhere these days?

Alpha Centauri (which is of course 2... IN SPACE) is on GOG. I don't think the writing in a TBS has ever surpassed SM:AC, really, at least not off the top of my head.

3 was the first I played. Loved everything about it except the Global Warming system which would get in the way of me playing a game indefinitely (I never particularly cared about the win conditions or if I nominally lost a match). Couldn't figure out any way to turn it off at the time. I also found the corruption mechanic chafing when it cut down on my sprawling empire and aggressive expansion, I can never really get myself to play tall.

Ck 2 and maybe 3 had an amazing mod that let you play out battles in Total War and then imported the results. Ah, what I'd give for that to be the case for Civ too, with Warhammer 3 you can even pull off the attack helicopters going up against barbarians!

Another thing I wish Civ embraced was more in depth diplomacy. In many regards I wish it was more simulationist instead of the glorified tabletop strategy game it is right now, but I know purists would scream.

The global warming mechanic violates literally every principle of fun game design; it punishes rather than rewards, it's random so you never know when you will get hit, and it's based on global pollution rather than national pollution so that you can still lose tiles even if you go completely green.

It's clearly the result of ideological bias rather than an attempt to make a good game and the only reason it is bearable is because it comes so late in the game.

Same thing with nuclear power plants. Extremely safe IRL, in Civ they go off like firecrackers on New Year's Eve.

ironically, pretty much everything in civ punishes you for building an advanced civilization. The best way to win is to "deathstack" a lot of cheap, early game, chariots, and just nonstop war until you conquer everything. Almost every building is just "for fun, if you feel like it. it won't help you win the game."

I love Civ 3, my only axe to grind is the cheating AI. I know that all AIs cheat, they have to in order to match a human player. But the AI cheating in Civ 3 is so bad that the AI nations are basically not even playing the same game as the human player.

Loved everything about it except the Global Warming system

This reminds me that by some standards I have been a global warming denier longer than most people. My best friend and I used to play and laugh at how comically overwrought it was to just have whole tiles going underwater. Like, sure, we can talk about just how much sea levels are or aren't rising, but the notion that during the modern era they're going to just dunk New York City under water always seemed very stupid to me.

Tell me about it. The designers of Civilization, with Ed Beach coming to mind, have specifically said that they refuse to have any in-game solutions to the effects of climate change because it's apparently far too complex a problem in reality for "easy solutions".

A load of horseshit that is, and you're right that anywhere remotely important such as NYC would have a sea-wall put around it posthaste. That's assuming more general geoengineering doesn't work to boot.

SMAC let you geoengineer global cooling and global warming and invest into pressure hulls so that your cities survive while everyone else drowns. It's a pity the balance in the game was so out of whack that ICS with forests was the winning strategy most of the time.

A load of horseshit that is, and you're right that anywhere remotely important such as NYC would have a sea-wall put around it posthaste.

I mean... to be fair that is exactly what happens in Civ 6. Global warming submerging your tiles is never a real threat unless you're quite far behind in tech. And in that case, you have bigger problems than submerged tiles.

I’ve played Civs 2-5, my first one was Civ 2.

Although playing Civ 2 was a revelation and at this point a core memory of my late childhood, I’ll agree with OP re: Civ 4

Civ 4 with all the expansions is absolutely peak Civ. The strategic and tactical complexity and intuitiveness is without equal. I still remember, years later, some of those individual game.

My personal best was a domination victory at 1792 AD on a Huge Tierra map on Marathon. I was the Ethiopians, I was going for a culture victory but kept getting sucked into defensive wars that ended up with me counterattacking and taking small bits of territory. I had to pivot to an all out military strategy when one of my Allies triggered a huge regional conflict and I ended up pulling a great khan and swallowing up everyone who opposed me. At some point I couldn’t handle any more new cities but still had such an overwhelming military advantage that I just kept going, burning and looting everything that stood in my way. Meanwhile I had found the new world and was pumping out settlers and seeding the continent with trading settlements. Game ended when my napoleonic style army had reached the southern tip of my home continent, with me holding the entire northern hemisphere in both the new and old worlds and every hostile power with their backs broken and the southern hemisphere only sparsely populated after dozens of wars of annihilation.

That was 2016.

To this day I start a new marathon game a year, and pick a new leader and map type and pick away at it for months until I win or lose.

Firaxis, like Intel, used to have a tick-tock release model: even-numbered games good, odd-numbered games bad. They have abandoned it with Civ 6, so I hope Civ 7 will be better than both 5 and 6.

I wouldn't say "bad". Civ 1 was obviously great, even if Civ 2 was much better, and Civ 3 and Civ 5 were both good, even if both started out as "one step forward, two steps back" in comparison to their predecessors. And then Civ 6 was the first one that I didn't even think was worth upgrading to even for novelty value. (I played one copy of it, but then didn't buy several copies for family multiplayer games like I had with 5 or even encourage friends to get it for multiplayer like I had with 4)

I think the more alarming thing about the odd numbered Civ games was overreliance on expansions/DLC, which went so far as to reintroduce game mechanics that had existed in previous versions and then been omitted from the sequels' base game. Civ 3 left out multiplayer, Civ 5 left out religion and espionage. And if you find yourself having to wait to upgrade until the game is back up to par again, why not just do what I did and wait a little longer until the game is in the bargain bin?

My brother in Christ, Civ 5 was awesome. And while I didn't play 1 or 3, I think it's safe to say 1 was good (otherwise nobody would've bought it and we wouldn't have had the series).

Civ 5 introduced the doom carpet, which was a step back from the doom stacks of 4.

I disagree. One unit per tile was such an improvement that when Civ 5 came out, I could never go back to 4. Combat actually became fun in 5, rather than a chore to be avoided like in 4.

How is combat fun in 5? Rally points are impossible, so you're actively punished for fielding a large army from many conquered cities. That's why they changed conquest victory to 'secure all capitals' because it was too much of a slog to secure a large chunk of the world.

It just is? I absolutely have fielded large armies, painted the map, and had a blast doing so.

I hated 6 but still played some 5 this year.

Not too optimistic about 7, but we'll see. Hoping for a more realistic artstyle.

Civ 5 + Vox Populi is the king of the genre imo.

civ 5 still has a very active multiplayer community playing lekmod

If only it actually worked. Doesn't for me, anyways.

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