Because they streamlined it too much so that even weak consoles like the Nintendo Switch can run it. I love the Switch, but don’t cripple Civilization so it can run on it
A lot of strategy games have been doing this recently and I don’t get it.
Paradox decided to release CK3 on console, but it lags so far behind the PC version (which itself already lacks content) and I haven’t bothered to try it.
Now I hear that AoE2 is being ported to consoles and it just doesn’t make sense at all unless you’re planning on requiring the player to hook up a keyboard and mouse. I don’t see any way a controller can provide a good RTS experience.
I actually do. Part of the appeal of the Civilization franchise to me has always been the ability to model the landscape and shape to get geography of my civilization. Civ 6 kind of break that and makes it worse with all the wonders scattered all over the place
There's Pandora that is a much better attempt than Firaxis' Beyound Earth, but if I may suggest, you shouldn't expect lightning to strike the same spot twice.
You can however hope that, just like with Civ1 (=> Civ2) => SMAC(X), someone will be inspired enough to take some of the best aspects of it in a somewhat different game :
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?
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 major bug was left unfixed. Secret societies are fun but not at all balanced.
Everything you said was basically my impression of the game when I left it. I didn't know about the last part, it doesn't surprise me they underdelivered on it.
Interesting, how is secret societies imbalanced? That wasn’t my impression and I still play the game somewhat recently (certainly no more imbalance than the different civils themselves)
Vampires combat strength is calculated as base strength of the strongest unit you have trained, plus 1 for every unit that has died in an adjacent tile (bonus from barbarians capped at +10). They don't normally die either, they retreat when brought to 1HP. You can intentionally sacrifice scouts around them to boost their CS. So you can realistically have unstoppable +30 CS vampires by mid game (as comparison, tank is +35 over a knight, two eras earlier), and unlimited CS by end game, as if you need an end game. Did I mention they also gain a -5 CS aura by industrial era? Their only weaknesses are lackluster movement (2, made up by earlier "airports" i.e. vampire castles), weaker passive healing (-5 HP per turn, made up by +50 from pillaging), and inability to form corps/armies (but you can get way more than +17 anyway).
Another big source of imbalance is of course the AI's inability to use any of the secret society powers effectively.
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.
I agree so much with this! I played a bit with friends who were more experienced, and this placement issue is such a negative experience when you notice on that you made a mistake on turn 4, but now it's turn 105 and you cannot correct or adjust to the mistake. And then you know you've already lost, but it takes 100 more turns before the game ends.
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.
It's definitely better than the previous ones .. the previous games feel unplayable now. I can't imagine civ5 (4 cities only to be viable and stupid-as-heck civic options) or earlier (no hexes, stacking units?). But... at the same time, Civ6 feels super phoned-in and underwhelming most of the time. (The AI dialog, world congress, road-building-via-trade routes, and various other stupid things are so annoying that I can't believe anyone who really cares about the game had any input on them.)
Mostly I just want the same game, made by a different company that's run by people who are less interesting in churning out DLC for $ and leaving all the quality-of-life stuff to modders.
> I can't imagine civ5 (4 cities only to be viable)
The "4 cities" may be easiest and most obvious strategy, but there's plenty of people who beat the game on Deity via Warmongering or spamming cities all over the map as well. The game has plenty of depth.
oops, I meant to write "I can't imagine going back to civ5".
I should have probably clarified anyway. There are other viable strategies that people have found, but I just find it very annoying how much the game shoehorns you into the 4-city strategy through the very-unfun and just... dumb?... happiness mechanic. Imo Civilization-building should be about finding optimal exponential growth based on what you have to work with in your particular game, not about optimizing against arbitrary breakpoints in the rules and/or exploiting degenerate and counterintuitive strategies (such as the mysteriously viable warrior spam).
It’s more realistic than Civ 5, but it’s not as fun. I feel that they made Civ 6 into a board game so that underpowered systems like the Nintendo Switch can run it. Civ 6 feels like a blend of Civ Revolution and Civ 5. I’m sticking to Civ 5.
Yeah, I couldn't make myself switch to Civ 6 from Civ 5 yet because of the art style. The cutesy cartoony style fits Pay-to-Win mobile crapware, not a game where you're the leader of the nation, involved in a "serious"strategic decision making - it breaks the immersion for me.
I have played all of them since the first and this is my most disliked. There's something just not quite right with it for me though I can't put my finger on it.
It was never fun in my opinion. Religion and espionage is so tedious and I couldn't be bothered with governors ( I would just put them somewhere and not think about them after that).
I started with Civ2 and played through most of the series. I played a lot of 5 and 6. To me Civ6 is not only the best game in the series. It's my favorite game in general.
The biggest difference is that civilizations in 6 feel distinct. In 5, all of them felt generic with cosmetic differences between them - except for Venice. In 6, with each civilization (and leader) it's like playing a different game. Preserving nature with Maori, settling tundra with Canada, cramming cities and districts with Japan, pillaging with Norway, eurekas with Babylon. I can pick the game again after two months and have a fun evening, without getting bored.
Speaking of districts, I love this mechanic. It makes sense and I like the extra puzzle and planning. I see how it gives board game vibes and I'm ok with it. Seeing the Civ series as simulation games is a mistake. They never were and they can't be. The reason for that is scale - both in size and time. The map is a grid of either squares or hexagons. Each tile has one feature and units move between them. If I zoom in, I don't get sub-tiles where I can do micro decisions. This constrains how realistic the simulation can be. On a world map, a peninsula of the size of Europe can have only a handful of cities.
Time have similar problems. Bronze Age passes quicker than the Modern Era. As a consequence, building the Sydney Opera House can take a hundred of years. And that's fine, because I pick gameplay over realism any time. Even the cartoonish art style doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I find it charming and unique compared to a boring, faux-realistic style of Civ5 which steps into an uncanny valley.
If you want a simulation approach, pick Paradox games. I tried them and I didn't like them, but I understand why they have a cult following. They still have board game elements, but the games are designed with constraints in mind. The gameplay takes a couple of centuries at most. The map isn't randomly generated, but it's scalable. The kingdoms and nations have fixed place. These decisions are consistent and make for a fun gameplay because Paradox games don't try to do everything.
It's better if Civ stays with a board-game approach. Having a clear identity is better than trying to be both "gamey" and realistic. It won't be for everyone and that's ok. For me, Civ6 is a good foundation. I'd like for Civ7 to use some ideas from Humankind, like elevated terrain, stackable armies with zoomed-in combat phase, the fame victory, and traits of a civilization that evolve over time. I'd also like to delegate parts of the game if I choose to. It would help with tedious parts and let me focus on things I find interesting.
It would be really interesting if some of the advances in AI could make their way into the game. Make the gameplay more human by incorporating recent advances in ML-based gameplay e.g. Diplomacy and Poker. Create more variety of dialogue using transformer models. Make in-game diplomacy more nuanced. There’s a lot that could be done.
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.
Exactly! Imagine word choice making the difference. Looking not too strong nor too weak. It would make for a really compelling game. Given Civ's AI track record my hopes are high but expectations low.
That seems like a game that would only be fun for very articulate people.
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?
>Gandhi is actually one of the most peaceful leaders in Civilization V, but his artificial intelligence parameters that control building and using of nuclear weapons have the value of 12, which is the highest of any leader.
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.
a lot about the nonsensical lust for 'ai' will be solved, once people realize it's not literal human 'intelligence', it's just a collage of data based on statistical analysis of past data and a prompt.
right, thats why some moves by alphago were called beautiful and deeply creative by human go masters?
idk know why this keeps getting repeated, it is NOT a statistical analysis of past data and a prompt. It is not just pattern matching. It is building models to predict patterns, which is a very different statement. And the fact of the matter is, is that is mostly still an unknown blackbox. It is an area of active research to understand the mechanisms of this blackbox.
And therefore it's "intelligent"? eye roll AI as we know it is nothing more than marketing. At least in the gaming sense everyone knows there are no actual smarts.
On closer examination it appears that you are correct. Sorry, I think I am mainly weary of all the "AI" hype so it's easy to have a knee jerk reaction.
> once people realize it's not literal human 'intelligence'
I suspect that our brains are so profoundly hardwired to recognize certain signal patterns as proof of conscious intent that soon, even experts who should know better are doomed to be fooled. The layman has no chance.
> The dirty secret is we think we want the AI to play more realistically, but actually don't.
The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
I think evidence of this in the popularity of matchmaking systems. Players engaging in that aren't primarily looking for meaningful human interaction (they often mute the chat), but rather a human-skilled opponent.
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 AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.
Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.
Sid had achieved competent but un-fun AI early on in the series and backed off. Players hate it because of how good it is at sacking poorly defended cities, especially early on when the AI knew too much about the global map.
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 could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
Meta made an AI to play Diplomacy which is able to talk to other players and play the game. It doesn't use a LLM, but it was able to win a tournament against human players.
I suppose what I mean is, in the context of a computer game where you’re playing a computer, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about cheating. The way the game works is the rules. There may be different rules for the human and AI players, but the expectation that they are the same is an assumption ported over from board games. It’s not really a thing in native computer games. For example nobody expects the computer opponents in a FPS to obey the same rules as the human player. So I don’t think cheating is really an applicable term.
My point is that it's kinda weird to claim that we had AI that was so good at opportunistically playing "like a human" by e.g. picking on poorly defended cities that human players hated it, but then admit that its proficiency is at least in part because it knows the whole map - that, by definition, is not "like a human".
The means is not human like, but the behaviour might well be. A human might conduct a search with scout units and intuit city locations from observed units and such to identify and target cities. Doing that in software might be infeasible, so you give the model full information and maybe program in a delay based on the distance to enemy cities before targeting them. The implementation is different but the behaviour ends up being hard for human players to distinguish.
Yes, but the problem persists since a truly competent AI will have good guesses about where and when to strike into your hidden territory based on what’s revealed to it, using the same advances that give computational room to respect fog of war.
The main thing I'd want in a Civ AI is to be barely competant at combat. Right now, if you can get a couple archers up in time, you can beat an AI army that's 2-5x your size depending on the terrain. Yeah, it feels bad as a beginner when you haven't bothered to build any military and an AI comes and kills you, but a beginner should be playing a beginner mode.
I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.
Realistically, if the Civ team were to want to do this, here's how I'd go about it:
1) Break the problem down into strategic goals and tactical actions, and then group the tactical actions into areas (e.g. diplomacy, resourcing, combat, research).
2) Process recorded online games of human players into streams of relevant events / choices.
3) Continually retrain your models on the output of 2.
You should thus have an AI that approximates the meta approaches of humans, which is really what we're talking about.
New players look exactly like bad AI: making poor choices, oblivious to things "the players community" already knows are always optimal, etc.
So really the problem is "How do we build a model that already knows what most of our players do, at this stage of the game's lifecycle?"
Which is essentially what one of the recent fighting games(?) did with their AI.
Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.
This comes up often in discussions about Axis & Allies Online. It has an AI, but it’s pretty basic and really only there as an aid to learn the rules before playing humans. The main way the game is played is ranked play on the built in ladder against humans, or custom games. There’s a discord that runs regular tournaments as well.
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.
IMO it's the reverse. I could swear some of these games intentionally keep the gap between good-play and bad-play very small so as to hide the deficiencies of AI.
The lack of choice in buildings, reasonably inconsequential bonus tile yields, minimalist tech tree where you have to research everything, lack of synergies between buildings-resources-terrains, etc. all make a lot more sense when you see what horrendous decisions the AI makes even on hardest difficulties.
Actually, if you play Stellaris, there is a mod called StarNet AI, which uses weights that are considered "meta". From my very limited personal experience (I got destroyed), it is not really fun to play an AI that uses very good strategies as it eliminates all previously viable, but not optimal playstyles.
Also, it feels _really_ good when you get to a new ship tier faster than your neighbors. The reverse is, however, very frustrating, as you are forced to play catch.
If you can make an AI that can play like a smart human, you can make an AI that plays like a dumb human. And you can design a game that rewards cooperation between smart or dumb players.
I'm not sure why you would think they, when multiplayer games obviously show that intelligent opponents are nice to play against and that diplomacy is not only possible but much more interesting between humans.
SMAC had a few restrictions that made dealing with its leaders harder, but more realistic. In Civ 4 and later Civs you can build complex deals and propose them to the AI leaders. If they are bad, they tell you they are not acceptable and you can try again and again. You can see the "diplomatic price" of each item.
In SMAC you could make a single proposal per turn. If it was good, they would accept it, if it was almost good, they would counter your offer, if it wasn't good enough, they would actually get madder at you and stop talking for the rest of the turn (or for a few turns if you relations were that bad). That was the only feedback you'd get.
This small change made parlaying with AI leaders feel more realistic. Instead of going "Hm, you won't give me Zaragoza and all your money, because 'we are losing' is only at +15, I'll come next turn when it should be at +17" you start building a mental model of each leader and proposing deals you think they should accept.
Totally disagree. Civ increases AI difficulty by gifting the AI free army units, resources and settlers. There are currently no 4x games where the AI can challenge an experienced player on even terms - the first game to do this (while also being a good game in and of itself) will be a massive success.
I remember (from HN) some genetic algorithm explorations of optimal research/build orders that discovered novel and better combinations then-unknown to the playerbase.
This is being repeated during every AI comptenecy discussion, giving an example of "you wouldnt want AI that never misses in FPS". But its completely missing point.
We want AI that is capable to never miss, and then is tuned down in a controllable matter. We want smart AI that are dumbed down in precise ways to create illusion of dumb AI, not dumb AI boosted by resources and damage modifiers to give illusion of a smart one.
You can make smart AI look dumb (thus weaker), but hardly ever you can make dumb AI look smart, thus now the strong AI is just dumb AI with advantage
My definition of a smart AI is an AI that is smart at mimicking a human - that means as a Game AI it would play an entirely different game of "mimicking a human" in essence.
The issue is that a lot of things a computer controlled player does is entirely too easy to implement with just a few random rolls. This starts to fall apart if you want to vary the difficulty. So you can get a credible if disdained "AI" in a lot less effort that say training a Neural net to predict what action a human would likely take next.
There simply is no "GPT-1" AI of playing a game yet much less a "GPT-3" level one and I do not think that it would be entirely easy at all to "tune" it in any way to get a consistent difficulty scale.
Hard disagree, I find civ to be crappy in single player because it’s AI is so dumb and just gets unfair advantages to remain competitive, it turns the game into just cheesing the stupid AI until you win at harder difficulties. So I ended up only playing multiplayer, but since the devs don’t care about making a reasonable networking stack it just crashes all the time. Hopefully they fix the AI, but if not I hope they actually make the networking stack not suck.
I think maybe the thing to do is not so much use LLMs (which I would still use for generating variety) for the AI's decision making, but to bring to bear the many lessons from TikTok and various other attention engines that we find on the internet.
Let the AI know everything, in the way that a father knows everything when teaching chess to his kid. But instead of just nurturing an independent chess player, feed the player with dopamine experiences that keeps him playing. Early victories, the joy of discovery, interesting diplomatic situations. Once they can play better, stretch it out a bit, more intricate setups.
Even here, comments are pointing out how bad Civ's AI is. The solution isn't more realistic AI. It's better deterministic "AI" that allows you to learn how it plays and devise different strategies for how to deal with it. Unfortunately, AI is largely an afterthought for developers and players don't really understand what they want either.
That just leads to everybody complaining about how bad the AI is in Civilization and Stellaris. Sure, these companies don't care because they have financial incentives not to care, but we're seeing the effects of studios not caring about AI right now. Not sure why you're defending them.
By «everybody», you probably mean the most experienced players, since it takes a good 100 hours for a human player to start being competent at the game, while your median player only has 40ish hours under their belt.
AI doesn't come free, GalCiv2 has been built around the AI being competent, but is IMHO a boring game as a result.
I guess I would agree with you for Civ 5 (and 6 ?) where the decision to switch to the 1 unit par tile system has crippled the AI... (while being pushed by Firaxis wanting to make the game more friendly to those sub-median-experience players !) But then I would argue that this system is bad for Civ itself, and this is an outlier.
(There's also the example of both AI Wars being built around embracing that the AI plays a different game, which from I hear works very well. It's questionable how applicable that is to your average 4X.)
> By «everybody», you probably mean the most experienced players, since it takes a good 100 hours for a human player to start being competent at the game, while your median player only has 40ish hours under their belt.
Nah, I mean everybody as in pretty much anybody I see talking about AI in these games, it's almost always negatively. And honestly, I don't care how experienced players are. If your average player is complaining about your AI, then you've failed.
Experienced players are just better at quantifying and identifying how AI fails and how it affects the gameplay.
Honestly, I struggle to see what your point is. That devs just shouldn't bother with AI?
And how likely is «pretty much anybody you see talking about AI in these games» to be overwhelmingly someone with way more experience than ~40 or even 100 hours ?
My point, trying to restate it in a different way, is that these language models might be low-hanging fruit to make an AI interacting with whom feels more like a head of state (and a specific historic one too !)
Though I'll note that Alpha Centauri has already achieved something like this using a very simple dialog AI (in a specific context).
Current civ6. Harder modes just give massive starter advantages and statistical bonuses.
3 starter cities compared to your 1. That can be brutal to overcome. Top players like potato mcwhisky basically have to know every little thing possible to win.
One area where current advances in (chatbot-style) AI would make a lot of sense to apply in games is to make non-critical (for gameplay) interactions with NPCs more interesting, just as "background noise" to make the game world feel more alive.
E.g. you could start an "interesting" conversation with a random NPC in GTA or Hitman instead of getting the same pre-canned reactions over and over.
The downside then however is that the scripted characters which are important for driving the story forward will feel like pre-programmed robots compared to any 'unpredictable' random NPC ;)
You want it to behave predictably. That doesn’t mean it needs to be predictably incompetent, and it doesn’t mean predictably optimal. Predictability is orthogonal to competency.
If the diplomacy mechanic cannot survive with players playing to win, then it’s clearly the diplomacy mechanic that’s wrong — diplomacy in reality is an inevitable result of multiple players playing to win; you don’t do diplomacy for fun, but to shift the world-state slightly in your favor by unifying against common threats.
Something must be fundamentally wrong with the model if it cannot encourage the most basic action within that model, without a player acting completely against his own interest
Just give us an AI multiplayer mode where the AIs don't always pick one human to rush, but also aren't pushovers, and which doesn't completely break 200 turns in.
Or if it does break, make it correctable. My friends all care more about continuing the game than about perfect fairness.
Big plus for continuing to work like that while supporting modding.
We have played every civ
a bunch, and none of them seem to support a 3-4 player "comp stomp" that hits the balance of hard late game, no cheap kills in the first 50 turns.
This is probably something that should be achieved by map / scenario / mod design ?
In fact since this is a common request, I keep seeing people implementing it in all kinds of games, I would be surprised if nobody in the Civ community had never set this up and shared across the whole 6+2 games franchise ?
This is how I want them to use AI in the coming game: give me a prompt to ask questions about my civilisation and everyone else's.
* Which one of my industrial zones has no workshops yet?
* What luxury resources am I receiving via trade? And with which players?
* What bonuses am I getting from the wonders I've built?
I can get all that information myself, but it takes a lot of clicking around - provided that I remember where to source it. Make it a Q&A, and playing the game will feel much less like working with spreadsheets.
That would be really neat if you could use that to have advisors who don’t feel so pointless - let you give instructions, perhaps with a confirmation rather than having to micromanage the things which don’t matter as much (“build x, y, and z in cities which have lots of culture and aren’t near the border”).
I hope they optimize the thing. I played one game of VI and felt the gameplay was an excellent fixup and polishing on the changes introduced in V, but it had gotten so slow that I was done after one game.
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 opportunity to make educational content that'd make people want to go read a history book afterwards.
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.
I had to look it up. There are a bunch of mods, wow. I stand corrected, sort of.
The UI to browse these mods is something out of a geocities website from the 1990s.
I should've been more specific, I meant modding that enables creators to actually make money and gets promoted by the game developer - not a dark corner that hasn't been updated in 30 years where you can click an image but can't get to the next image without zooming out. That's not modding, that's, I don't even know what to call it - a historical artifact by people who don't seem to be aware of what century we're in.
It's a platform backed by a large company, it's bad for everyone (in the long term).
The much more problematic DRM and other walled garden issues aside, Steam's interface seems to be designed to emphasize safety, which would be fitting for software aimed at pre-teens, but is actually harmful for the teenagers and older that are its target.
(Of course one reason Valve likely did it is because it makes the job of their moderators easier - compare with the old Steam phpBB forums - and company-paid moderators is also the easiest moderation system to set up and maybe more importantly, remain in control of.)
What amazes me is partly how easy it is for mods to work together. Really some software engineering done right there too, in the groundwork of their mod system.
Modding is kind of in tension with the concept of direct sales... for similar reasons that open source is in tension with it. It's even worse for games, since most games are closed source, and mods generally directly build up on them.
I could see total conversion mods perhaps separately selling their art assets like this (since the open source of the rest of the code already often is in tension with the level of ownership that artists tend to claim over them).
The closest we got to what you suggest is probably StarCraft 2's Arcade mode, and platforms like these are bad for reasons too obvious to state on HN.
But Civ4 is a great example in how you can create one of the biggest and longest lived modding communities out there : you just need to open up your game ! And this is something that dates to Brian Reynolds' Civ2 : https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
Sadly, Civ5 was a regression there, and looks like Civ6 even more so ?
Speaking of educational content, here too Civ4 seems to be unsurpassed in its Encarta-like Civilopedia, and mods have only improved on the depth and breadth (if maybe not accuracy) by often cribbing their descriptions from encyclopedias :
Mac OS / System 7 on the web was shown off on HN "recently" because it's kind of cool.
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!
They need to really work on the Civ AI especially the military AI. The games are super boring once you learn the AI is basically garbage at managing armies.
Also the late game needs to be more meaningful. A lot of players never make it to the later ages because victory is achievable quite a bit sooner unless you're plating for science victory.
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, which is essentially a Civ 2 remake with good automation of the boring stuff. Over the years I've probably played that even more than the original.
The other surprising exception is Civilization Revolution 1 for the iPad. It stripped out manual terrain improvement entirely and left a really fun game behind. Sadly because it's in the apple ecosystem you can't get it anymore. It only runs on iOS 8 and below, and has been replaced in the store by Version 2 With Microtransactions and Pay To Win. I keep an old ipad on life support just to play it.
But yeah, the mainline Civ games have been (for me) a chance to pay $60 every few years, get excited, and be disappointed.
I think I might finally break out of my cycle with this one.
I dunno, just based on how much studios believe they need to deliver in a AAA title. You seem like you’re craving a simpler experience than the enormous budget and revenue expectations dictate will get created.
I wondered if anyone would bring it up. Polytopia other than csgo is the only game I really play anymore. It's essentially civ distilled into a perfectly cruftless experience. It's also perfect for multiplayer, as it works beautifully on phones (less friction to take a turn) and you can easily jump into 24-hour turn limit games.
I'm not sure the civ guys can come up with something to compete with it. The recent games were so bloated and everything dragged on to the to point you'd just lose interest mid game, or quit before an inevitable victory/loss in the late game.
Also I'm not sure what you could do to improve Polytopia to make it a better game, except adding multiplayer team games.
No, it was a big downgrade. It wrecked game balance, and the AI was incapable to deal with the new system... all while the worst issues with stacks had been solved years ago in Alpha Centauri !
Just because new players didn't know how to scout and/or that artillery does collateral damage to stacks...
Yes as much as I have found memories of the first Civilization, I'd still say Civ 2 is my favorite followed by Civ IV.
Alpha Centauri is still my favourite of them all though.
I keep buying them but I only ever liked civ IV. Stealing cities with culture was so much fun. They also had Spock do the voice acting. What a phenomenal game.
To say that it fell short is a gross understatement. Alpha Centauri is one of the greatest games of all time. Beyond Earth isn't even a good Civilization game.
There are very, very few games out there that have something to say about philosophy. Alpha Centauri is a tour de force. It lets you explore many different philosophies of government and societal ethics. It continues the conversation that began with Plato's Republic, a multi-millennia-old debate about what constitutes an ideal society. It lets you experiment and build your own vision of utopia, while clashing with other visionary founders and their competing ideas.
It's absolutely fascinating and addictive stuff! I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys thinking about philosophy, as well as anyone who enjoys 4X games.
> 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.
On the contrary, they add a whole new strategic dimensions to the game. In Civ I you had what, two victory conditions (Domination and Science)? In Civ V, you have also Cultural Victory (producing much more tourism than every other civilization's culture) and Diplomatic (getting most of the city states on your side). This is not "crap to micromanage", but more like changing the game from 2D chess to 3d chess.
Not to mention, the one unit per tile limit in Civ V makes combat much more tactical and interesting (combat is no longer just about quantity).
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.
Yeah I played some games in 6 and became nostalgic of 2 and Alpha Centauri too. Recently, I decided to just conquer everyone mid game and as i was capturing one of the last cities suddenly bam Defeat. Apparently as I was capturing their cities their religion was spreading (how does that make sense? Did Mongols become Zoroastrian? Did Islamic conquests bring Christianity to Saudi Arabia?) and they reached religious victory
I think Civ V in particular reduced micromanagement in certain respects to a degree where I now often find SMAC becoming tedious towards the end game. The main reason is the massive reduction in the number of cities and units in Civ V due to their high maintenance costs, and making individual cities matter more.
Since owning lots of cities essentially comes at relatively little cost in the older Civ games, towards the end the AI will have spammed cities in just about every nook and cranny. (The addition of sea bases in SMAC seems like an interesting addition at first but accentuates this problem.) In SMAC the relationships with some of the AI leaders also tend towards more or less perpetual war which, with the high number of cities, I find frustrating since striking down or conquering a chronically belligerent neighbour requires capturing (or razing) a ridiculous number of individually insignificant cities.
Shifting the maintenance costs of units from individual cities to gold paid from the treasury also reduces micromanagement of those unit costs. Having cities defend themselves at some level without having units stationed also reduces the need to micromanage their defences in some cases.
I haven't played the first Civ that much but I played a lot of Civ II, and I think it suffered from some of those issues as well.
It's true that some of the changes in later Civs do also add further micromanagement. The archaeologists added in Civilization V: Brave New World require going all over the world (and generally hand-holding them), and the entire mechanic seems like a bit of an odd but more or less compulsory detour in the game. And optimizing the great works stuff in general quickly turns into micromanagement. Dealing with e.g. city-states and their quests also introduces some of it, although they also add another (potentially interesting) strategical conduit to the game.
With that said, I still find SMAC to be one of the best games in the series, and there will always be a place in my heart for Civ II.
I think Civ V in particular reduced micromanagement in certain respects to a degree where I now often find SMAC becoming tedious towards the end game. The main reason is the massive reduction in the number of cities and units in Civ V due to their high maintenance costs, and making individual cities matter more.
I really didn't like that about Civ V. It totally destroyed the mood of the game. No longer was it about building a great empire. It essentially became turn-based Warcraft.
I want a game that lets me build even larger empires with more cities than Civ 1. To cut down on micromanagement the game needs smart tools for automation and delegation.
It seems like with Civ V onward they pushed the game farther and farther away from SimCity and toward The Sims. That's fine. Lots of people love The Sims. But I prefer SimCity.
It should first take the good parts from the previous 'classic' games: CIV IV's modability, CIV 2's Throne room, somewhat more random combat (a bit like original CIV but not as much), a half decent AI... and don't rush it.
Slightly out of topic, does anyone know any good mods for Beyond Earth to completely recreate Alpha Centauri?
I tried Beyond Earth, really didn't like it but I absolutely loved Alpha Centauri
The Digital Antiquarian, a brilliant blog that’s been chronicling gaming history in exquisite detail, just wrote about Civilization II as part of a series on strategy gaming sequels:
I played Civ II, Civ V, and VI. After the disappointment that was VI, I'll either wait for a <$10 GOTY sale, or for them to announce that they'll release a proper SDK again that allows modding as it did for 5. Otherwise, I'll just keep playing Civ V with Vox Populi fka community balance patch.
After playing Europa Universalis, I don’t think Civ is doing it for me. Here are a few issues:
- You can’t automate many tasks. This is especially true in Civ 6 where you have to re-select everything. I’m not certain who thought this is a good idea.
- As you progress in the game, the turn time become ridiculously long.
- For it to be reasonably fast, you are limited in term of map size and the number of opponents.
- The AI is dumb. After a few plays, the game is pretty much predictable.
Europa Universalis covers all of these shortcomings and more. However, it’s not turn-based and it’s still stuck in the 1700s, so no new technologies. Climate change, for example, is an interesting addition and adds spice to the game.
Still looking forward to Civ 6. Will be playing at least a couple times to see their progress.
I played Civ I-IV and then discovered Paradox Interactive's games. Just stopped playing Civ after that. I've played some games of Victoria 2 that are so interesting I chat about them with history nerds around dinner.
I think Paradox studio is the real underdog, and everyone loving Civ games should check them out.
I love the 4x concept and tried almost all major games in this category, but left after one or two playtroughs because there was always something pushing me away.
Usually its the need for mocromanaging everything on huge scales in longer games.
Im hooked on Crusader Kings 3 for a year now, and want to get into Europa Universalis and Victoria 3 afterwards
Yup no turning back now after supping on CK3 wine.
I tried EU4 but graphics/text-rendering issues meant I just couldn't play it. I look forward to an EU5 with a CK3 quality make over. Sounds like we might have to wait a year or so Vic3 iron out all it's issues.
It's funny that you would call PDS the underdogs, because while Civ still has (some) of its former glory left and so is still a bestseller, the many PDS games are together probably at this point leading in terms of funding and popularity. And almost everyone else is far behind.
To use a metaphor, in the «slow strategy video games» sector, Firaxis/TakeTwo are akin to the creators of Avatar for movies, while PDS/Paradox are Marvel/Disney.
I can't imagine playing Civ now without murder, marriages, a dynasty to care for etc. Crusader Kings has prompted me to read dozens on history books due to how engages you with real historical events in a way that no Civ ever has beyond checking a wiki page on a world wonder or some such.
My perfect game would be Crusader Kings with a bit of Civ flavour: add the tech tree, world wonders, exploration and more freedom for where to found cities and I would be over the moon.
Have you played Old World? Created by the Civ 4 designer, and more of a Civ-with- CK elements than the reverse, but I've stopped playing Civ since it came out.
I haven't heard of it, I will take a look, thanks.
I remember being very disappointed in Civ 5 compared to Civ 4 but I can't now remember much about it. I think I liked the slime-mould like spread of culture/religion compared to the simplification in 5. Was there also unit stacking?
Have loved every Civ since 1 but it seems theres certain fetures that they'll never change/improve like battles and wonders. I also thought the graphics in 6 were a backwards step and the world council too much of a break in the flow.
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.
Civ 4 was peak Civilisation in my opinion. Everything about it felt polished, fun, and intentional. Great music and voice acting, wonderful expansion packs, great multiplayer that didn't require any other service, great scenario and custom maps.
and then they had this weird idea that a successful strategy game should abandon everything and, instead, should become a micromanagement game with very little possible automation (the builders system instead of workers)
> and then they had this weird idea that a successful strategy game should abandon everything and, instead, should become a micromanagement game with very little possible automation
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadEdit: This is objectively good news, given the creativity demonstrated throughout the game's history.
Paradox decided to release CK3 on console, but it lags so far behind the PC version (which itself already lacks content) and I haven’t bothered to try it.
Now I hear that AoE2 is being ported to consoles and it just doesn’t make sense at all unless you’re planning on requiring the player to hook up a keyboard and mouse. I don’t see any way a controller can provide a good RTS experience.
I agree with you on the cartoonish leaders though.
Of course I like digging my own roads. I get to decide exactly where they go. That's the game.
You can however hope that, just like with Civ1 (=> Civ2) => SMAC(X), someone will be inspired enough to take some of the best aspects of it in a somewhat different game :
https://www.wargamer.com/shadow-empire/review
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?
Another big source of imbalance is of course the AI's inability to use any of the secret society powers effectively.
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.
Mostly I just want the same game, made by a different company that's run by people who are less interesting in churning out DLC for $ and leaving all the quality-of-life stuff to modders.
The "4 cities" may be easiest and most obvious strategy, but there's plenty of people who beat the game on Deity via Warmongering or spamming cities all over the map as well. The game has plenty of depth.
I should have probably clarified anyway. There are other viable strategies that people have found, but I just find it very annoying how much the game shoehorns you into the 4-city strategy through the very-unfun and just... dumb?... happiness mechanic. Imo Civilization-building should be about finding optimal exponential growth based on what you have to work with in your particular game, not about optimizing against arbitrary breakpoints in the rules and/or exploiting degenerate and counterintuitive strategies (such as the mysteriously viable warrior spam).
I guess I just wanted a simpler game.
The biggest difference is that civilizations in 6 feel distinct. In 5, all of them felt generic with cosmetic differences between them - except for Venice. In 6, with each civilization (and leader) it's like playing a different game. Preserving nature with Maori, settling tundra with Canada, cramming cities and districts with Japan, pillaging with Norway, eurekas with Babylon. I can pick the game again after two months and have a fun evening, without getting bored.
Speaking of districts, I love this mechanic. It makes sense and I like the extra puzzle and planning. I see how it gives board game vibes and I'm ok with it. Seeing the Civ series as simulation games is a mistake. They never were and they can't be. The reason for that is scale - both in size and time. The map is a grid of either squares or hexagons. Each tile has one feature and units move between them. If I zoom in, I don't get sub-tiles where I can do micro decisions. This constrains how realistic the simulation can be. On a world map, a peninsula of the size of Europe can have only a handful of cities.
Time have similar problems. Bronze Age passes quicker than the Modern Era. As a consequence, building the Sydney Opera House can take a hundred of years. And that's fine, because I pick gameplay over realism any time. Even the cartoonish art style doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I find it charming and unique compared to a boring, faux-realistic style of Civ5 which steps into an uncanny valley.
If you want a simulation approach, pick Paradox games. I tried them and I didn't like them, but I understand why they have a cult following. They still have board game elements, but the games are designed with constraints in mind. The gameplay takes a couple of centuries at most. The map isn't randomly generated, but it's scalable. The kingdoms and nations have fixed place. These decisions are consistent and make for a fun gameplay because Paradox games don't try to do everything.
It's better if Civ stays with a board-game approach. Having a clear identity is better than trying to be both "gamey" and realistic. It won't be for everyone and that's ok. For me, Civ6 is a good foundation. I'd like for Civ7 to use some ideas from Humankind, like elevated terrain, stackable armies with zoomed-in combat phase, the fame victory, and traits of a civilization that evolve over time. I'd also like to delegate parts of the game if I choose to. It would help with tedious parts and let me focus on things I find interesting.
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?
[clap emoji]x3
idk know why this keeps getting repeated, it is NOT a statistical analysis of past data and a prompt. It is not just pattern matching. It is building models to predict patterns, which is a very different statement. And the fact of the matter is, is that is mostly still an unknown blackbox. It is an area of active research to understand the mechanisms of this blackbox.
I suspect that our brains are so profoundly hardwired to recognize certain signal patterns as proof of conscious intent that soon, even experts who should know better are doomed to be fooled. The layman has no chance.
The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.
I don't necessarily want an AI that tries to play like a human, though it would be a fun option, I want an AI that isn't just straight up terrible given the same starting resources and rules as the player.
Part of the problem, I think, is that each iteration of Civ, they make the game more complicated in a way that makes it even harder for the AI to do as well as a good player, but probably most players don't care and there isn't a lot of reason to become good at the game anyway.
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 could be on a later turn, or what it’s presence indicates about its home civilisation’s disposition out of sigh. That sort of thing is extremely hard to program, so the only way to compensate for the AIs inability to intuit information is by actually giving it the information.
Which is why the parent of the entire chain mentioned the advances in AI.
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/cicero-ai-negotiates-persuades-...
I'd love God mode AI to put up any sort of half decent fight without needing to have so many more units that just go through an endless meat grinder because they can't coordinate or figure out how to back off and heal.
1) Break the problem down into strategic goals and tactical actions, and then group the tactical actions into areas (e.g. diplomacy, resourcing, combat, research).
2) Process recorded online games of human players into streams of relevant events / choices.
3) Continually retrain your models on the output of 2.
You should thus have an AI that approximates the meta approaches of humans, which is really what we're talking about.
New players look exactly like bad AI: making poor choices, oblivious to things "the players community" already knows are always optimal, etc.
So really the problem is "How do we build a model that already knows what most of our players do, at this stage of the game's lifecycle?"
Which is essentially what one of the recent fighting games(?) did with their AI.
Is it that players hate good AI or that flagrant cheating breaks immersion? I think the latter would be an interesting AI target: can you make something which plays well but doesn’t do things which are obviously impossible for the player to do in-game - e.g. helping the AI with some extra resources isn’t glaring but having attacks perfectly target things the AI shouldn’t be able to see, or instantly repair damaged units, etc. is something you could never duplicate even if you were the best player in the world.
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.
In the context of Civ, you could have each civ leader have unique personality, and that would add a lot of color to the game.
"Nuclear Gandhi" being the prime example.
The lack of choice in buildings, reasonably inconsequential bonus tile yields, minimalist tech tree where you have to research everything, lack of synergies between buildings-resources-terrains, etc. all make a lot more sense when you see what horrendous decisions the AI makes even on hardest difficulties.
Also, it feels _really_ good when you get to a new ship tier faster than your neighbors. The reverse is, however, very frustrating, as you are forced to play catch.
In SMAC you could make a single proposal per turn. If it was good, they would accept it, if it was almost good, they would counter your offer, if it wasn't good enough, they would actually get madder at you and stop talking for the rest of the turn (or for a few turns if you relations were that bad). That was the only feedback you'd get.
This small change made parlaying with AI leaders feel more realistic. Instead of going "Hm, you won't give me Zaragoza and all your money, because 'we are losing' is only at +15, I'll come next turn when it should be at +17" you start building a mental model of each leader and proposing deals you think they should accept.
Every one gets a challenge (or not if they chose so). We are probably not quite there yet.
And that was 10 or so years ago.
Which is more constrained than your average 4X, but not fundamentally different (resource + research + movement + combat).
We want AI that is capable to never miss, and then is tuned down in a controllable matter. We want smart AI that are dumbed down in precise ways to create illusion of dumb AI, not dumb AI boosted by resources and damage modifiers to give illusion of a smart one.
You can make smart AI look dumb (thus weaker), but hardly ever you can make dumb AI look smart, thus now the strong AI is just dumb AI with advantage
The issue is that a lot of things a computer controlled player does is entirely too easy to implement with just a few random rolls. This starts to fall apart if you want to vary the difficulty. So you can get a credible if disdained "AI" in a lot less effort that say training a Neural net to predict what action a human would likely take next.
There simply is no "GPT-1" AI of playing a game yet much less a "GPT-3" level one and I do not think that it would be entirely easy at all to "tune" it in any way to get a consistent difficulty scale.
The neighbour saw this and sent me a message saying "If this were a harder difficulty mode, I would think you were planning to attack me!"
Let the AI know everything, in the way that a father knows everything when teaching chess to his kid. But instead of just nurturing an independent chess player, feed the player with dopamine experiences that keeps him playing. Early victories, the joy of discovery, interesting diplomatic situations. Once they can play better, stretch it out a bit, more intricate setups.
No idea how to code this up.
Meanwhile an AI better at roleplaying now seems to be a low investment for a decent reward situation ?
AI doesn't come free, GalCiv2 has been built around the AI being competent, but is IMHO a boring game as a result.
I guess I would agree with you for Civ 5 (and 6 ?) where the decision to switch to the 1 unit par tile system has crippled the AI... (while being pushed by Firaxis wanting to make the game more friendly to those sub-median-experience players !) But then I would argue that this system is bad for Civ itself, and this is an outlier.
(There's also the example of both AI Wars being built around embracing that the AI plays a different game, which from I hear works very well. It's questionable how applicable that is to your average 4X.)
Nah, I mean everybody as in pretty much anybody I see talking about AI in these games, it's almost always negatively. And honestly, I don't care how experienced players are. If your average player is complaining about your AI, then you've failed.
Experienced players are just better at quantifying and identifying how AI fails and how it affects the gameplay.
Honestly, I struggle to see what your point is. That devs just shouldn't bother with AI?
My point, trying to restate it in a different way, is that these language models might be low-hanging fruit to make an AI interacting with whom feels more like a head of state (and a specific historic one too !)
Though I'll note that Alpha Centauri has already achieved something like this using a very simple dialog AI (in a specific context).
3 starter cities compared to your 1. That can be brutal to overcome. Top players like potato mcwhisky basically have to know every little thing possible to win.
E.g. you could start an "interesting" conversation with a random NPC in GTA or Hitman instead of getting the same pre-canned reactions over and over.
The downside then however is that the scripted characters which are important for driving the story forward will feel like pre-programmed robots compared to any 'unpredictable' random NPC ;)
If AI was playing rationally then you would actually be able to understand it’s decisions and it wouldn’t do random shit or block deals because of RNG
If the diplomacy mechanic cannot survive with players playing to win, then it’s clearly the diplomacy mechanic that’s wrong — diplomacy in reality is an inevitable result of multiple players playing to win; you don’t do diplomacy for fun, but to shift the world-state slightly in your favor by unifying against common threats.
Something must be fundamentally wrong with the model if it cannot encourage the most basic action within that model, without a player acting completely against his own interest
Or if it does break, make it correctable. My friends all care more about continuing the game than about perfect fairness.
Big plus for continuing to work like that while supporting modding.
We have played every civ a bunch, and none of them seem to support a 3-4 player "comp stomp" that hits the balance of hard late game, no cheap kills in the first 50 turns.
In fact since this is a common request, I keep seeing people implementing it in all kinds of games, I would be surprised if nobody in the Civ community had never set this up and shared across the whole 6+2 games franchise ?
* Which one of my industrial zones has no workshops yet? * What luxury resources am I receiving via trade? And with which players? * What bonuses am I getting from the wonders I've built?
I can get all that information myself, but it takes a lot of clicking around - provided that I remember where to source it. Make it a Q&A, and playing the game will feel much less like working with spreadsheets.
Next we’ll have a game where that’s the only interface for this information, and enemy spies makes it lie to you.
I would prefer more open games so that it's much easier to run queries like this myself.
https://imgur.com/a/YClX6xD
Going to try and play a few rounds with these rules
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 opportunity to make educational content that'd make people want to go read a history book afterwards.
Or maybe it's just me :)
The UI to browse these mods is something out of a geocities website from the 1990s.
I should've been more specific, I meant modding that enables creators to actually make money and gets promoted by the game developer - not a dark corner that hasn't been updated in 30 years where you can click an image but can't get to the next image without zooming out. That's not modding, that's, I don't even know what to call it - a historical artifact by people who don't seem to be aware of what century we're in.
Is the Steam Workshop that bad for Civ?
The much more problematic DRM and other walled garden issues aside, Steam's interface seems to be designed to emphasize safety, which would be fitting for software aimed at pre-teens, but is actually harmful for the teenagers and older that are its target.
(Of course one reason Valve likely did it is because it makes the job of their moderators easier - compare with the old Steam phpBB forums - and company-paid moderators is also the easiest moderation system to set up and maybe more importantly, remain in control of.)
https://mods.factorio.com/
Scrolling the tech tree of the Caveman 2 Cosmos mod for Civ4 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxAn5gXb2A
(not sure what the exact count is these days, but it's on the order of a thousand techs)
Mod presentation : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman-2-cosmos.2885...
Latest major version released last month and Player's Guide : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman2cosmos-v43-pl...
Modding is kind of in tension with the concept of direct sales... for similar reasons that open source is in tension with it. It's even worse for games, since most games are closed source, and mods generally directly build up on them.
I could see total conversion mods perhaps separately selling their art assets like this (since the open source of the rest of the code already often is in tension with the level of ownership that artists tend to claim over them).
The closest we got to what you suggest is probably StarCraft 2's Arcade mode, and platforms like these are bad for reasons too obvious to state on HN.
But Civ4 is a great example in how you can create one of the biggest and longest lived modding communities out there : you just need to open up your game ! And this is something that dates to Brian Reynolds' Civ2 : https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
Sadly, Civ5 was a regression there, and looks like Civ6 even more so ?
Speaking of educational content, here too Civ4 seems to be unsurpassed in its Encarta-like Civilopedia, and mods have only improved on the depth and breadth (if maybe not accuracy) by often cribbing their descriptions from encyclopedias :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=495s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=1326s
https://youtu.be/-titvSZsurE?t=945
(this player ignores the historical descriptions, but spending minutes reading them is something that most viewers are not likely to be interested in)
Personally, the regression from Civ4 to Civ5 in their Civilopedias is for some reason what pained me the most...
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!
https://system7.app
Also the late game needs to be more meaningful. A lot of players never make it to the later ages because victory is achievable quite a bit sooner unless you're plating for science victory.
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, which is essentially a Civ 2 remake with good automation of the boring stuff. Over the years I've probably played that even more than the original.
The other surprising exception is Civilization Revolution 1 for the iPad. It stripped out manual terrain improvement entirely and left a really fun game behind. Sadly because it's in the apple ecosystem you can't get it anymore. It only runs on iOS 8 and below, and has been replaced in the store by Version 2 With Microtransactions and Pay To Win. I keep an old ipad on life support just to play it.
But yeah, the mainline Civ games have been (for me) a chance to pay $60 every few years, get excited, and be disappointed.
I think I might finally break out of my cycle with this one.
The ideal sequel would be "Civ 1, with new graphics and better automation". Then iterate on that every few years.
[0] https://polytopia.io/
I'm not sure the civ guys can come up with something to compete with it. The recent games were so bloated and everything dragged on to the to point you'd just lose interest mid game, or quit before an inevitable victory/loss in the late game.
Also I'm not sure what you could do to improve Polytopia to make it a better game, except adding multiplayer team games.
Just because new players didn't know how to scout and/or that artillery does collateral damage to stacks...
Other sequels were meh, the only good feature is borders creep that prevents other players from building cities on your territory.
Literally the only turn based strategy I like
There are very, very few games out there that have something to say about philosophy. Alpha Centauri is a tour de force. It lets you explore many different philosophies of government and societal ethics. It continues the conversation that began with Plato's Republic, a multi-millennia-old debate about what constitutes an ideal society. It lets you experiment and build your own vision of utopia, while clashing with other visionary founders and their competing ideas.
It's absolutely fascinating and addictive stuff! I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys thinking about philosophy, as well as anyone who enjoys 4X games.
Same for me, though I couldn't exactly pinpoint why - maybe its the simplicity?
On the contrary, they add a whole new strategic dimensions to the game. In Civ I you had what, two victory conditions (Domination and Science)? In Civ V, you have also Cultural Victory (producing much more tourism than every other civilization's culture) and Diplomatic (getting most of the city states on your side). This is not "crap to micromanage", but more like changing the game from 2D chess to 3d chess.
Not to mention, the one unit per tile limit in Civ V makes combat much more tactical and interesting (combat is no longer just about quantity).
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.
Since owning lots of cities essentially comes at relatively little cost in the older Civ games, towards the end the AI will have spammed cities in just about every nook and cranny. (The addition of sea bases in SMAC seems like an interesting addition at first but accentuates this problem.) In SMAC the relationships with some of the AI leaders also tend towards more or less perpetual war which, with the high number of cities, I find frustrating since striking down or conquering a chronically belligerent neighbour requires capturing (or razing) a ridiculous number of individually insignificant cities.
Shifting the maintenance costs of units from individual cities to gold paid from the treasury also reduces micromanagement of those unit costs. Having cities defend themselves at some level without having units stationed also reduces the need to micromanage their defences in some cases.
I haven't played the first Civ that much but I played a lot of Civ II, and I think it suffered from some of those issues as well.
It's true that some of the changes in later Civs do also add further micromanagement. The archaeologists added in Civilization V: Brave New World require going all over the world (and generally hand-holding them), and the entire mechanic seems like a bit of an odd but more or less compulsory detour in the game. And optimizing the great works stuff in general quickly turns into micromanagement. Dealing with e.g. city-states and their quests also introduces some of it, although they also add another (potentially interesting) strategical conduit to the game.
With that said, I still find SMAC to be one of the best games in the series, and there will always be a place in my heart for Civ II.
I really didn't like that about Civ V. It totally destroyed the mood of the game. No longer was it about building a great empire. It essentially became turn-based Warcraft.
I want a game that lets me build even larger empires with more cities than Civ 1. To cut down on micromanagement the game needs smart tools for automation and delegation.
It seems like with Civ V onward they pushed the game farther and farther away from SimCity and toward The Sims. That's fine. Lots of people love The Sims. But I prefer SimCity.
(AFAIK, no, but it has been years since I last checked)
-but you might be interested in Shadow Empire :
https://www.wargamer.com/shadow-empire/review
https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
- You can’t automate many tasks. This is especially true in Civ 6 where you have to re-select everything. I’m not certain who thought this is a good idea.
- As you progress in the game, the turn time become ridiculously long.
- For it to be reasonably fast, you are limited in term of map size and the number of opponents.
- The AI is dumb. After a few plays, the game is pretty much predictable.
Europa Universalis covers all of these shortcomings and more. However, it’s not turn-based and it’s still stuck in the 1700s, so no new technologies. Climate change, for example, is an interesting addition and adds spice to the game.
Still looking forward to Civ 6. Will be playing at least a couple times to see their progress.
Usually its the need for mocromanaging everything on huge scales in longer games.
Im hooked on Crusader Kings 3 for a year now, and want to get into Europa Universalis and Victoria 3 afterwards
I tried EU4 but graphics/text-rendering issues meant I just couldn't play it. I look forward to an EU5 with a CK3 quality make over. Sounds like we might have to wait a year or so Vic3 iron out all it's issues.
To use a metaphor, in the «slow strategy video games» sector, Firaxis/TakeTwo are akin to the creators of Avatar for movies, while PDS/Paradox are Marvel/Disney.
(note, high funding & popular ≠ good)
They don’t have any AI or any mechanics. It’s all just shallow and designed for maximum DLC.
Combat is literally whoever has the biggest number under the guise of “strategy”
I can't imagine playing Civ now without murder, marriages, a dynasty to care for etc. Crusader Kings has prompted me to read dozens on history books due to how engages you with real historical events in a way that no Civ ever has beyond checking a wiki page on a world wonder or some such.
My perfect game would be Crusader Kings with a bit of Civ flavour: add the tech tree, world wonders, exploration and more freedom for where to found cities and I would be over the moon.
I remember being very disappointed in Civ 5 compared to Civ 4 but I can't now remember much about it. I think I liked the slime-mould like spread of culture/religion compared to the simplification in 5. Was there also unit stacking?
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.
See also: Victoria 3