Sid Meier's Civilization

Computer God Autism said:
Same with the UI
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UIs have gotten worse, I couldn't stand Anno 1800 with the mobile style huge pop-ups and so little information density. I think that's also related to monitor resolution though, a 10px tall button at 1080p is fine, at 4k it's minuscule so they have to either scale up the UI or scale it dynamically. But I think the blandness is a bigger issue, tons of games just have a grey or semi-transparent rectangular UI. Banished did it well with its modular windows, you could choose what you wanted and where you wanted. Anno 1404 also had some nice small customization like being able to select what resources you see or customize the build menu to include UI or system buttons not just buildings to build. It's all so homogenized, I wonder if it's related to now there's classes on good UI or game design and everyone's just learning the same thing instead of trying new things for each project.
 
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Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown said:
I watched a few of the review videos that dropped yesterday with presumably the embargo lifted

- hot seat multiplayer isn't in the base game, getting patched in with an upcoming DLC
- most of the content creators hate the bland gray UI
- Potato McWhiskey complained that the various districts aren't color-coordinated anymore (ie. Blue=Science, Yellow=Commerce, etc). That all the buildings and districts look bland and indistinguishable
- no World Congress
- no option to Liberate cities upon capture
- troops get teleported home during era changes, some troops just get vaporized with era changes altogether
- wars immediately end upon era switching
- no countdown warning to Era switching, immediately occurs once a civ meets 100% progress on the meter
- no hotkeys
- no minimap
- no World Builder
- no TSL starts
- no Pangaea map option
- no Barbarians
- apparently lots of performance issues due to animations of skirmishes continuing throughout the turn during the midgame even on highend PCs, possibly due to Denuvo
- no quick movement or quick resolve battle animations
- no maps above Standard size
- max 8 player slots including AI
- no renaming cities
- no unit promotions or upgrading units, all progress is now slotted on to Commanders who carry over (but can also be killed)
- no Builders
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What in the actual fuck? This just SCREAMS dipshit project manager that thinks "if it's not broke break it" is a coherent plan. It's like they wanted to make the worst possible version and make the least amount of loyal fans happy.
 
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thejackal2 said:
What in the actual fuck? This just SCREAMS dipshit project manager that thinks "if it's not broke break it" is a coherent plan. It's like they wanted to make the worst possible version and make the least amount of loyal fans happy.
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One of the public faces of the franchise doing community outreach, Carl Harrison (ie. Carl the Barbarian in some of Civ6's New Frontier Pass DLC promo vids) was promoted to Junior Lead Designer for VII or some such title after being a QA wageslave on VI.

Carl seems like a nice enough guy, but also seemed really underqualified. He had no programming background at all before joining the Firaxis Civ VI team. He was basically a nerd and a Civ fan with a History degree IIRC.

The QA for Civ 6 was also awful. One of their paid DLC packs with the New Frontier Season Pass introduced a Monopolies & Corporations mode where players could achieve bonuses by controlling luxuries & develop products, etc.

But the mode was gamebreaking Day 1 out of the box because the code meant that AI competitors wouldn't ever collect their own luxuries to trade until they unlocked a terminal technology about 2/3 way down the tech tree.

Meaning they weren't competing with players for monopolies, never had anything to trade and eventually would have their empires rebel due to unhappiness.

Modders on PC managed to push a hotfix within a few weeks.

But Firaxis never acknowledged shipping a broken product & never addressed it with their own hotfix even though they still had another 3 patch releases to go in the Season Pass.

The mode wasn't fixed until about 3 years later ln consoles without mod support. I also suspect it never would've been patched at all if Civ VII wasn't delayed a few years and some superficial Leaders' Pass content was pushed out in the meantime. Firaxis essentially stopped supporting the game for 2-3 years between April '21 and Dec '23.
 
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Fig Kommandant said:
UIs have gotten worse, I couldn't stand Anno 1800 with the mobile style huge pop-ups and so little information density. I think that's also related to monitor resolution though, a 10px tall button at 1080p is fine, at 4k it's minuscule so they have to either scale up the UI or scale it dynamically. But I think the blandness is a bigger issue, tons of games just have a grey or semi-transparent rectangular UI. Banished did it well with its modular windows, you could choose what you wanted and where you wanted. Anno 1404 also had some nice small customization like being able to select what resources you see or customize the build menu to include UI or system buttons not just buildings to build. It's all so homogenized, I wonder if it's related to now there's classes on good UI or game design and everyone's just learning the same thing instead of trying new things for each project.
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I'd like to throw Frostpunk 2 as an example for that as well. The UI from the first game compared to it's crap sequel is night and day, imo.
 
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Fig Kommandant said:
It's been a common strategy for the past decade to attract more fans, it never works but they keep trying...
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I think I said this but I should have just set my expectations to zero when for the last 6 months the PRE SALE BUY NOW BUY NOW popup was literally 2/3 the screen after the steam launcher on 6.

Maybe I will revisit 4 with some mods instead of buying this crap.
 
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thejackal2 said:
Maybe I will revisit 4 with some mods instead of buying this crap.
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Fig Kommandant said:
I've seen people recommend Realism Invictus, it got an update semi-recently and apparently it changes the base game a lot.
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Can highly recommend. Realism Invictus continues to be sporadically updated (about once a year), but other mods I can recommend would include History Rewritten (essentially how I would imagine IV would have turned out if Firaxis just decided to keep developing it instead of making V, very tight gameplay but can be a bit unforgiving in how tight the balancing is), Planetfall (a proper spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri), RFC: Europe (probably the best RFC-based module, really wish that there more civlikes went down the RFC line of development - currently there's also an enhanced edition that's in development), Sengoku (basically taking the old Civ III scenario, porting it to IV's mechanics, then mixing in a bunch of ideas from Nobunaga's Ambition and TW: Shogun 2), Sword of Islam (an aged RFC module inspired by the Broken Crescent TWM2 mod, but probably would be the best if Europe hadn't come around, currently there's also an enhanced edition being developed). There's also other classics like Pie's Ancient Europe, Fall from Heaven II and its myriad modmods (Kael, the developer, is apparently working at Amplitude so there's a chance the upcoming Endless Legend II will be a spiritual successor to FFH) and Caveman 2 Cosmos (honestly I can't bring myself to get into it, prehistory and space age speculation goes against the whole appeal of civilization for me).

Civ 4 is one of those games that you can pay $10 for, get an amazing base game of a few dozen hours, then spend a good decade enjoying free content that shows up a lot of professionally developed games.
 
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Mordecai 3 Finger Brown said:
- troops get teleported home during era changes, some troops just get vaporized with era changes altogether
- wars immediately end upon era switching
- no countdown warning to Era switching, immediately occurs once a civ meets 100% progress on the meter
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This concept (or at least the latter two bullet points) is kinda neat. It really is like three mini-games, then.

It also reminds me of this amazing video:

Not to be mean, but we already knew about most of the other stuff, though. The UI is a major bummer for me. First Crusader Kings, and now this.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
(Civ Rev on DS isn't so bad)
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Ah, a fellow man of culture.

Perfect game speed for its level of complexity, in my opinion. It also looks pretty nice. I have fond memories of persisting to the end of the game as the Germans; I lost at either 4th or last place, but it felt like I had earned my survival.

I even made the Nuke once. Gigantic waste of time and Production. Still, having a 3-D thing in my 2-D game is neat.
 
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Foxxo said:
Not to be mean, but we already knew about most of the other stuff, though. The UI is a major bummer for me. First Crusader Kings, and now this.
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There's probably more relevant stuff that I didn't watch or didn't remember. I mostly made the list from what I remembered off the top of my head.

Some of the reviews were like an hour long, so I watched the start and then mostly skimmed the comments.

I haven't actually watched much VII reveal content since the initial announcement made it known that the Humankind civ switching and pre-baked eras were main features, which made me lose interest.

I'm coming late to Civ6 mods after playing vanilla for a long time on console.

I'm enjoying what some of the modders have done and don't have much interest in buying VII myself until it gets much cheaper.

I picked up Old World during one of last year's Steam sales, but haven't actually tried it yet because I hate learning new games.
 
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Computer God Autism said:
It evens out since the game is also being made by people that aren't interested in history.
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You may be surprised that the Firaxis team seems to have full time historians on staff.

There's an employee named Andrew Johnson who lurks over in the CivFanatics forums and seems to have worked on both VI & VII.

AFAICT, his sole function is to make historical suggestions and perhaps write some of the text blurbs.
 
Mordecai 3 Finger Brown said:
You may be surprised that the Firaxis team seems to have full time historians on staff.

There's an employee named Andrew Johnson who lurks over in the CivFanatics forums and seems to have worked on both VI & VII.

AFAICT, his sole function is to make historical suggestions and perhaps write some of the text blurbs.
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What does that pay? Because given the rigor they're showing lately I could do a better job for a Starbucks gift card.
 
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Foxxo said:
Still, having a 3-D thing in my 2-D game is neat.
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There was gonna be a Wii version, and Sid Meier said Firaxis had "no intentions of turning backs on the Wii version". Now it is 2025.
 
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