I wonder if it will be able to cope with case-sensitive filesystems? I still haven't got to play one on my Mac because they've never supported case-sensitivity.
Playing Civ 5 here on Antergos, works flawlessly, very nice experience. Having the successor for Linux as well would be just awesome. However, it's not totally clear whether it will be ported… cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/55vuci/civili...
I created a separate case insensitive partition on my MBP to deal with that issue. For things that really, really wanted to use the main partition, I moved their content to it and created a symbolic link for things like ~/Library/Steam that points to the other partition. Was a very effective solution.
I simply won't buy it until there's a Linux version. It's pretty much my rule for games these days...if I have to reboot to play, I know I'll almost never play, so I just don't buy Windows-only games.
I only switched to Civ V from IV because it has a Linux version (and Civ IV does not, though it does run reasonably well under Wine, though I hate the fiddling required to keep Wine and GPu drivers happy through OS upgrades and such). Civ V runs as well under Linux as it does under Windows; not perfect, mind you, but it's not perfect under Windows either.
I prefer playing on Windows, not only because of the sheer availability of games (and hardware drivers) but also because I don't want to have any chance of mixing work and play. I like to keep them completely separate.
I learned an incredible amount from this series. Pretty much every Civ, tech, religion, civic, or unit with a special name ("Hoplite") is a story in itself worth reading about. Not just the civilopedia, which is a good start.
I may have spent more time playing this game than reading actual history books.
Unfortunately, Paradox games use that term slightly differently than is standard. It doesn't mean any justification for war, but any act that then starts a justified war. (e.g., "reclaim our land" is not a casus belli, but the initial conquest of that land was a casus belli.)
Up a notch? Only if "notch" is code for orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the same applies to hours sunk. Compared to the paradox sims, civilization feels like something you can play through in your lunch break.
Whoo, boy, I lost way to many hours to EU 3 & 4 when I was in college. The worst part is that I think it actually helped my studying, as I was a history major.
They changed that up with the new fortification mechanic where only some provinces have forts and they block hostile movement through adjacent provinces. It had some pretty major gameplay ramifications.
I always wanted to get into EU3, but it seemed massively obtuse for a beginner and since I was running it on a Mac through Steam, the tutorials didn't work properly so I couldn't figure anything out.
And then I read how much of a time-sink it is (compared to Civ) once you get going and I think that I was probably lucky it didn't work in a lot of ways!
I played EU3 for a while and its great, but over all I found it too slow at the start and too hard later on to the point where I didn't play enough to get good at it. I do love a lot about the game, but I could never quite get into it enough.
Crusader Kings 2, on the other hand, I've played to death and love :) especially the Game of Thrones mod.
I'd say it more like compare an arcade flight sim to a hardcore military flight sim. From a distance one might just look like a more advanced version of the other, but they're fundamentally very different games that appeal to different audiences (despite there being some obvious overlap).
The newer victory options, such as "cultural victory" always felt a little artificial to me. Did they improve that in civilization VI? Also, I watched part of the AI battle royale this week, and one of the developers commented that domination victories in such battles among AI players would be very rare. That's a pity, because IMHO this is the most fun way to win.
I played a lot of Civ I and III, but kind of stopped after that. Culture was present in III while being almost useless except as a way to prevent you from founding cities near other players.
But I personally love the idea of cultural victory. Military victories are an easy way to win, but they feel unsatisfying to me because you never develop high technology. Advancing your civilization needs to have some payoff.
A lot of games lean heavily on having you judge a "guns or butter" tradeoff, where if you don't produce enough otherwise worthless guns, someone else will come in and take all your nice stuff. I prefer to play in an all butter style, where you're competing over how well you develop yourself rather than how well you can balance an unfun military tax against fun development.
That's akin to racing in time trials instead of a race with other cars beside you. It's more challenging when you engage with the enemy because then instead of just developing your own economy you have to second guess your opponents in the race for the nuke. I was so sad when they nerfed the nukes in 5. Try playing against humans and see how far culture&religion will get you.
> Try playing against humans and see how far culture&religion will get you.
That's a fact about the design of the game, not a fact about what would be fun.
> That's akin to racing in time trials instead of a race with other cars beside you.
I guess you changed this from "that's akin to playing on a deserted island" after realizing that plenty of games, and novels, are all about surviving and establishing yourself on a deserted island?
It's only akin to racing in time trials rather than against other cars if your model of "racing with other cars beside you" is Mario Kart. It's precisely analogous to racing against other cars on the fairly reasonable assumption that you're not supposed to run into the other cars in the race.
> instead of just developing your own economy you have to second guess your opponents in the race for the nuke
There's no "race for the nuke" in Civ. If you're going for military, you'll win or lose long before you develop nukes.
Racing for the nuke does work. You turtle yourself, get the nuke and cripple your neighbour. You won't be able to take anything from him (not because of radiation but because you don't have any offensive units) but he won't recover either.
Yep, culture victories as an "all-butter" way of playing. I like a single-city challenge going for either diplomacy or culture. No spending hours walking units across the map, just focus on your own business in one simple city.
Religion can be important for culture though and I find it too similar to the war mechanics i.e. churn our religious units, march them across the map, fight for control...
If you're looking for a "butter only" game centered around economic competition, I highly recommend Offworld Trading Company (http://www.offworldgame.com/).
You can just turn off the other victory conditions. I typically choose the victory condition first and just allow that otherwise it can feel like you are playing chess when others are playing chequers.
There are times when the multiple conditions makes for a better game e.g. having to keep cultural powerhouse in check during a domination attempt with a couple of nukes on their culture producing cities.
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've played since mostly seem to follow Civ's relatively remote/high level investment in cities.
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.
> 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)
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. =)
> 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).
One of the best things about the Amiga version was the music/soundtrack. It was such high quality, and always seemed to match perfectly what was happening in the game - from the jangly violins and upbeat folky "exploration" songs, to the mournful pipe music that played once a battle was dragging on a bit.
Another one of those games that taught me loads about the history of a situation, as much as it was loads of fun.
The only thing that wasn't fun is that the game seemed to corrupt floppy disk 2 every once in a while, even when it wasn't write-enabled.
I always thought III was the sweet spot for Civ. They've changed hands a couple of times, so perhaps it's because of new teams, but it's never quite seemed on target since III. IV had a rubbish interface, V used insane amounts of CPU mid game on, and I wasn't that convinced by single troop per space.
It's not just that I'm older and less interested in games - there's still the odd one makes me think I need rehab. Factorio managed to achieve it early this year! I'll undoubtedly buy VI and play it though.
If you look in older HN threads about Civilization, for every version of Civilization you'll find somebody claiming it's the best. And they'll have valid reasons for their claim.
I didn't get into the series until 5, but I'm really glad I did. The AI wasn't so good, but the mods that were built for it are fantastic and solve so many issues with the game. Even only exploring the map and fighting off raging barbarians can be fun. Anyone have any favorite MODs? I've been playing the community mod for a while. It's incredible the amount of work fans put into that game. I want to thank them all for making rainy days a lot more enjoyable. A bottle of wine and a friend makes for a great Civ V experience.
I don't recall their names right now, but I have a pair of barbarian upgrading mods I'm running right now that are tons of fun. All the Civs is constantly at the grips of a disorganized barbarian horde with their own technology tree.
InfoAddict is a awesome for getting a higher level view of what's happening in the game.
The world rendering is different than before, but in a less unpleasant way than I expected. I wholeheartedly agree about the UI though. A chaotic mess of styles, typefaces, colors and scales. Also the font rendering seems a bit wonky in places, like when you mix system rendering with text rendered to bitmap on a different engine.
But civs are like shoes, the new ones never fit as well as those that are already well worn in.
I am surprised no one mentioned freeciv yet.
I used to play Civ II on Amiga. After moving to linux on a PC I found myself missing Civ and found freeciv. It was even better than Civ because of the multiplayer aspect of it. I played with my friends over 'LAN' over serial port connection. Ah! Good times!
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 game, I had a city with districts that reached out to the end of my city's border. One of the AIs decided to place a city right next to my border and the very next turn expresses nervousness at my troop buildup near its border. The troops being the units fortifying my city, which were there before it settled its city.
Yup, my first game the Aztecs were my closest neighbor, and to my southeast. Luckily it was through 2 one block holes in a mountain range so i just set up some archers and let loose. War ended with them giving me a ton of money and a city :D
Now, against humans... people that pick a Civ with unique military units that require low tech usually have a tendency to declare war early, since those units will provide them with early advantage.
Now, war drives your happiness down and production/science goes down with it. Declaring war early might not be a very good strategy unless you know very well what you are doing. Like ganking a civ that everyone is in war with.
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.
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.
it's fun to try comming up with plausable arguments as to why the ai is dumb. like "they sent off a bunch of settlers as sacrifical lambs to help delay your aggressive expansion/incursion into their sphere of influence"
Every time a civ game is released, people forget how every previous civ game release has gone. Namely; 1. Release shiny game with bugs and performance issues. 2. Release major update to fix issues. 3. Release a balance and UI tweak patch. 4. Release a free content patch alongside some DLC.
At least in Civ 5, that's a REASON for Civs to DOW you, not a reason for them not to. Expansionist Civ 5 AIs are opportunistic; they attack what they perceive as weaker neighbours. That's why you never grant them embassies or open borders; so they don't learn that you're not building an army.
There's something unpleasant in graphical style. Similar to standard "chinese warcraft clone" style which is default game style these days, but not quite it. Reminds me about Clash of kings.
This style is more similar to Civ III and IV. Civ V had a more "serious" art style, with normal proportions and a more natural color palette.
Personally I am among the people that enjoyed Civ III and IV more than any other Civ. Civ Beyond Earth had good potential and I was legitimally hyped by the trailer, but the game was less fun than Alpha Centauri.
I wonder when will they make a real sequel to Alpha Centauri. I think it is still the best Civilization game out there. For me Beyond Earth seemed like a bland reskin. In AC you could terraform, do social engineering and design your own units. I havent seen something like that ever since.
Pretty sure it is "license hell" between EA and Firaxis (maybe a third party?) so Beyond Earth is about the best we are going to get. Do wish this wasn't the case as I loved AC, terraforming was great especially being able to deny the AI cities water by building a giant mountain to the west of them.
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 Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.
It's funny, I stopped playing Civ V because the interface seemed so clunky compared to SMAC. Maybe it's just that I haven't had 10 years to get the Civ V hotkeys wired into my brain, but it seems like the keyboard is less of a concern these days.
Both games share a similar problem of repetitiveness, but being able to use the keyboard and muscle memory makes SMAC a lot less tedious for me.
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..."
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 chosen broke up with him, but that she died.
No game has lived up to SMAC for me. I feel that was the first game that was 'art' and showed me what games could become. I am glad to hear that others feel the same way. 13 year old me was obsessed with it. This quote helped change my life and made me look at myself in a different way, a revolutionary thing back in those days:
"I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment." -Anonymous, Datalinks (played when the player first constructs the hab dome building).
Those quotes added a lot of atmosphere to it (from techs). And also from secret projects. Those blurbs are so memorable...Not to mention the encounters with Planet! All those fancy sequels of Civ seem empty after playing SMAC.
Brian Reynolds was the chief designer of that game (and Colonization). I don't think you're going to see a true sequel unless they get him to collaborate.
EA owns the rights so the name and characters will probably never be re-used.
The gameplay itself won't receive a true sequel for the same reason we won't see another civ like Civ2 or Civ4.
A media- and story-rich space game would require enormous resources to make the same impression on gamers today that SMAC made on gamers in 1999. I don't believe Firaxis has the bandwidth to do that and also do X-Com and the Civ series.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadI only switched to Civ V from IV because it has a Linux version (and Civ IV does not, though it does run reasonably well under Wine, though I hate the fiddling required to keep Wine and GPu drivers happy through OS upgrades and such). Civ V runs as well under Linux as it does under Windows; not perfect, mind you, but it's not perfect under Windows either.
I may have spent more time playing this game than reading actual history books.
No wonder this was the first game where I played all night and after a few hours wondered who turned the light on. Then it dawned on me.
That was a wikipedia-less age though.
Good one!
I find Victoria 2 much more interesting, and Crusader Kings 2 is just amazing the way it makes you think and play with the mindset of a feudal lord :)
And then I read how much of a time-sink it is (compared to Civ) once you get going and I think that I was probably lucky it didn't work in a lot of ways!
Crusader Kings 2, on the other hand, I've played to death and love :) especially the Game of Thrones mod.
But I personally love the idea of cultural victory. Military victories are an easy way to win, but they feel unsatisfying to me because you never develop high technology. Advancing your civilization needs to have some payoff.
A lot of games lean heavily on having you judge a "guns or butter" tradeoff, where if you don't produce enough otherwise worthless guns, someone else will come in and take all your nice stuff. I prefer to play in an all butter style, where you're competing over how well you develop yourself rather than how well you can balance an unfun military tax against fun development.
That's a fact about the design of the game, not a fact about what would be fun.
> That's akin to racing in time trials instead of a race with other cars beside you.
I guess you changed this from "that's akin to playing on a deserted island" after realizing that plenty of games, and novels, are all about surviving and establishing yourself on a deserted island?
It's only akin to racing in time trials rather than against other cars if your model of "racing with other cars beside you" is Mario Kart. It's precisely analogous to racing against other cars on the fairly reasonable assumption that you're not supposed to run into the other cars in the race.
> instead of just developing your own economy you have to second guess your opponents in the race for the nuke
There's no "race for the nuke" in Civ. If you're going for military, you'll win or lose long before you develop nukes.
Religion can be important for culture though and I find it too similar to the war mechanics i.e. churn our religious units, march them across the map, fight for control...
There are times when the multiple conditions makes for a better game e.g. having to keep cultural powerhouse in check during a domination attempt with a couple of nukes on their culture producing cities.
Colonization was a fun game, though. I still load it up quite often on GOG.
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 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've played since mostly seem to follow Civ's relatively remote/high level investment in cities.
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.
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)
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. =)
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).
Another one of those games that taught me loads about the history of a situation, as much as it was loads of fun.
The only thing that wasn't fun is that the game seemed to corrupt floppy disk 2 every once in a while, even when it wasn't write-enabled.
http://www.freecol.org/
It's not just that I'm older and less interested in games - there's still the odd one makes me think I need rehab. Factorio managed to achieve it early this year! I'll undoubtedly buy VI and play it though.
InfoAddict is a awesome for getting a higher level view of what's happening in the game.
And why couldn’t they keep the fantastic Art Deco-style UI?
But civs are like shoes, the new ones never fit as well as those that are already well worn in.
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 game, I had a city with districts that reached out to the end of my city's border. One of the AIs decided to place a city right next to my border and the very next turn expresses nervousness at my troop buildup near its border. The troops being the units fortifying my city, which were there before it settled its city.
It's like playing against a schizophrenic.
After Civ beyond the sword, some Civs would express their aggression in terms of espionage.
Now, war drives your happiness down and production/science goes down with it. Declaring war early might not be a very good strategy unless you know very well what you are doing. Like ganking a civ that everyone is in war with.
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.
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.
Sounds like a good aproximation of real politics
At least in Civ 5, that's a REASON for Civs to DOW you, not a reason for them not to. Expansionist Civ 5 AIs are opportunistic; they attack what they perceive as weaker neighbours. That's why you never grant them embassies or open borders; so they don't learn that you're not building an army.
Personally I am among the people that enjoyed Civ III and IV more than any other Civ. Civ Beyond Earth had good potential and I was legitimally hyped by the trailer, but the game was less fun than Alpha Centauri.
A third of the way through a game and my military units are orders of magnitude better than my opponents, because the AI doesn't know to stack traits.
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 Civ game comes close to Alpha Centauri for atmosphere.
Both games share a similar problem of repetitiveness, but being able to use the keyboard and muscle memory makes SMAC a lot less tedious for me.
"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.
"I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment." -Anonymous, Datalinks (played when the player first constructs the hab dome building).
I always see this quote with this fresco: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--rQuNLP71fA/UdonE8DAuAI/AAAAAAAAC...
"My son was asked to use the word prototype in a sentence. He said: 'people are a prototype'. I was too scared to ask what he meant."
The gameplay itself won't receive a true sequel for the same reason we won't see another civ like Civ2 or Civ4.
A media- and story-rich space game would require enormous resources to make the same impression on gamers today that SMAC made on gamers in 1999. I don't believe Firaxis has the bandwidth to do that and also do X-Com and the Civ series.
Even though the Dragon's engines are for emergency take off or surface landing, they would not be used in space in real life, unless I'm mistaken.
Pretty sweat that they included it in the trailer, though!