- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I found the proper vessel for God's holiest operating system.
Sid Meier's Civilization
- Thread starter MrWarioWare
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- Joined
- Jan 22, 2023
I recently played a game of Civ 7, which really does not live up to the franchise but has gotten better since release. One thing that happened without fail is that the Harriet Tubman AI acted like a nigger, and it appears to have been programmed that way. Constantly starting wars with you and everyone else in the game and otherwise stealing stuff. Very demanding and obnoxious. They tried to be woke, but they ended up creating a digital minstrel show.
Smashed & Slamed
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I would honestly like seeing abstract or custom wonders. Kinda like great works in CK2.
Lurking no more
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
If you were to make more of a sandbox 4x maybe, but I think a lot of the fun people have with Civ is building great achievements from history. Washington building the Great Temple (Pagan, Tier II) doesn't have nearly the same impact as if he built the Temple of Artemis, even if that doesn't make much sense. I think the psychology of it is somewhat similar to civ changing, even if you do it well, I think most people would prefer to guide one Civ and leader through history rather than flipping every couple of ages, even if the latter would be more accurate.
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2024
They've been in since Civ III, they're called national wonders.
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2015
If you mean Ara (what a weird fucking name), it wasn't great.
It ran like shit even on a good pc, for a top down game where you stare at maps all day. The AI is batshit hostile and will never trade with you or make deals or even accept your gifts so that you may one day trade with them. One of the leaders (Joan of Arc) has a penalty to diplomacy that makes the AI hate you even more.
The game is built around crafting queues and production orders. You build a sea salt extractor to get salt, build a pig farm to produce pork, combine pork and salt at a butcher to make bacon, and then spend bacon to help grow your cities. But inevitably you'll produce too much or too little of one resource, or one of your buildings will stop working for some reason and your entire economy will come crashing down and you have to spend 10 mins fixing everything.
Beyond that the game is just kind of tedious to play. Every turn you're bombarded with notifications - one of your cities isn't producing anything, three of your cities' borders have expanded and you have to tell them where to go, one of your crafters has run out of resources... it never feels like you're getting anywhere, and the tools you have to manage all of your crafting shit are terrible, at least when I last played.
Your cities grow so slowly, the only way to maintain constant growth (the number has to go up, oy vey) is to keep producing new food amenities and running them in all of your cities 24/7. So every decision on what tech to research, where to expand, what resources to trade for, is almost entirely driven by what will let you make new food; croissants, or bacon, or beer, or bread.
The economy building also felt a bit repetitive. In Millennia, you could base your production economy around trees, clay, stone or metal, based on what was around you, and craft an entire economy that was suited to your environment. But in Ara, the same resources are always good, and you tend to build the same things in the same order every game.
It also has this bizarre 'culling' system, where at regular intervals, the civilizations with the lowest scores get nuked instantly, and you can't turn it off. So midway through one of my games, the continent-spanning Aztec empire just disappeared, leaving a bunch of ruins to sift through and nothing else. No neutral cities or barbarians left in their place, just a bare continent for me to resettle unopposed.
The war rules and military deployment system are retarded. You have a time limit to war and if you don't complete your objective before the arbitrary timer ends you have to go home and try again 20 years later. And before you can use any soldiers, you have to build the unit, select a city to deploy it in (and you have to pick the smallest most irrelevant city to boost their combat strength), you have to deploy multiple units at a time in a formation, then wait for them to reach the enemy, by which time the war is already over. And combat is fully automated. Your units basically collide with the enemy in a big cartoon cloud, and then the game declares one side to be the winner, and the only thing you can do as a player is send more reinforcements to add to the battle.
I never actually reached the end of an Ara game, it's just too tedious to play through. At one point I moused over a mineral deposit to see what you can make with it, and the game said it could be used to build mecha robots, which felt a bit silly but I can't imagine sticking with the game for that long. I never got past gunpowder technology wise.
I'll accept my puzzle pieces now.
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2016
Well, that sounds more like Pharoh than Civ, think I'll pass.
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2023
The culling mechanic sounds sort of interesting if it weren't on a fixed schedule or could be toggled off. Sort of mirroring how some peoples like the Mayans or the Dorset peoples just sort of vanished one day.
But it would have to be balanced with new civilizations arising as well, such as the rebellion mechanics from older civ games where an empire could split into two factions.
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- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Old World is far, far better than Civ for my tastes. I couldn't get into Civ VI at all. It could drain my time but I couldn't comprehend it and didn't really enjoy it. I can't stop playing Old World. I figured out my Hittites problem, there's a setting retardedly buried deep in the game setup that has to be toggled even if you toggle it in the launcher to include Heroes of the Aegean.
The more I play this the more I like the economic gameplay. Even when it's gamey, it still makes its own kind of sense. I can get how Civics thematically come from stonemasons (monuments, government buildings) and lead to social progress (specialists) and how Training (military logistics) comes from mining (blacksmithing). I also like that science primarily, in the early game, comes from industry (specialists). Before I'd overbuild food dramatically, grab land that I would never have enough workers to develop and stupidly ignore developing specialists for Training and Civics. In my current Hittite game I developed poorly (locked myself out of early war tech for way too long, had a very costly war to subdue the Numidian bats swooping in from every direction, Carthage stole my kill and bullies me), but I have this one city that has a huge quarrying operation and the feeling of making new specialists in a single turn is orgasmic.
The more I play this the more I like the economic gameplay. Even when it's gamey, it still makes its own kind of sense. I can get how Civics thematically come from stonemasons (monuments, government buildings) and lead to social progress (specialists) and how Training (military logistics) comes from mining (blacksmithing). I also like that science primarily, in the early game, comes from industry (specialists). Before I'd overbuild food dramatically, grab land that I would never have enough workers to develop and stupidly ignore developing specialists for Training and Civics. In my current Hittite game I developed poorly (locked myself out of early war tech for way too long, had a very costly war to subdue the Numidian bats swooping in from every direction, Carthage stole my kill and bullies me), but I have this one city that has a huge quarrying operation and the feeling of making new specialists in a single turn is orgasmic.
Smashed & Slamed
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
You can now turn off the culling.
And the mechanic tied to it is that on the spot of the dead civ you get spaws of something akin to tribal villages where you get resources and artifacts.
It's a neat idea but not executed well enough. Might work better if you could set the number of civs culled and the game could handle a fuck huge map with all the civs at once.
Also it shouldn't trigger if civs get killed naturally during an era.
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
In Master of Orion 2 (published by MicroProse who also published Civ 1 and 2), one can reassign population working in agriculture or industry to research. It's sorta kind of unrealistic: it'd be like sending Joe the blue collar worker to work in some chemical research facility, or Farmer John to research in the quantum physics department at uni.
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2023
Yeah that's something that non-4X games like the Tropico series or Surviving Mars do well: having citizen education or labour specialization mechanics.
With Tropico (or at least T5), your Carribean dictator island starts with only a handful of HS educated citizens and the rest unskilled plebs. Worker slots without a qualified education candidate remain vacant. Early on before schools can be built, one has to rely on buying educatsd outsiders to work the slots at a premium with a delay that one has to wait for the next cargo ship to arrive with them.
Surviving Mars has very similar citizen specialization mechanics as well. I believe unskilled workers can fill skilled slots in this one, but at huge productivity penalties.
Given the game is about colonizing Mars, a big mechanic is choosing certain professions from a pool of applicants to be your Founders on the planet to try to establish a livable habitat. So some of the planning involves choosing some professionals young enough that they will live long enough to get you through when you can train or import the next generations.
Different genre of games and definitely some more micromanagement. But other games have tackled the "Assign citizen production" mechanics with more granularity.
I suppose another difference between the two colony builders above & Civ is that both actually have individual unique clickable citizens with names, profiles, wants/needs, ages, permadeath, etc.
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
Original Master of Orion system makes more sense: there are a certain number of factories per unit of population, number of which increases with automation techs. Production from factories (measured in BC, for billions of credits) can then be allocated to different endeavors, such as research and ecology (cleaning up pollution and terraforming).
The colony management system of MoO2 is pretty much "Master of Magic in space" (oh and Master of Magic is another MicroProse release).
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- Joined
- Apr 28, 2021
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
For Old World I’ve desired a mechanic to steal specialists in slave raids. Classical slavery had no particular connection to “skill” and the idea of stealing a painfully expensive, long-term Elder Philosopher to teach your population metaphysics at the point of a sword is actually a realistic idea. A Persian emperor famously built a town as an exact replica of an older Greek one to try to cheer up his sullen workforce of Greek slave artisans.
Edit: Tribes could even have actual rural improvements, like Civ city-states, and then you could steal elite workers from the mines/farms/plantations to work your own.
In other 4X games it could be brain drain and/or targeted immigration; Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe, Chinese in Southeast Asia are examples of that kind of settlement. In a modern day focused game IQ shredders could be a painful mechanic.
Edit: Add Victoria to the list of franchises with occupational ladders. Minimum literacy rates are necessary for Pops to advance to work like industry. You simply cannot, in that game, industrialize without a sufficiently educated workforce. In the vanilla game Japan had a massive advantage at Meijiing without even needing flavor content just because Japan has sky high literacy. Conversely, you can free all your slaves as the South and still be fucked by not being able to use your illiterate slaves as factory workers. (This isn’t really accurate, but it does convey the problem of an illiterate society in a simple, lazy way.)
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- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
Now I'm thinking about the idea of a 4x game with an average IQ metric for an empire.
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Civ VIII
The Kingdom of Mali
+500 to average IQ to represent the University of Djenne (pic: mud hut)
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Is there a mechanic in Old World to prevent enemy reinforcement oversea? Such as across a strait where they own the water?
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2014
In Master of Orion (the original 320 x 200 DOS vidya), all ships of a class move and attack in unison in a battle, and a civilization can only have 6 ship classes at a time. If they already have 6, then they gotta scrap all ships of a class to make room for a new one. It'd be like if all Galaxy class starships involved in a battle stuck together in a formation and were all synchronized. Then, if that Federation wanted to make a new Sovereign class and they already have 6 different designs, they may have to scrap all the Galaxy class starships in order to be in a position to even be able to build Sovereign class ships in the first place. I think there is no refitting of the ships either.
most highly illogical
most highly illogical
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Since I mentioned the University of Djenne, you all know how people constantly bring up the impi like Shaka Zulu was some mega-brained 1000 IQ genius just for reinventing the pincer movement?