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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2371 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 16, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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.

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