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Sid Meier's Civilization
- Thread starter MrWarioWare
- Start date
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- Aug 12, 2024
I view the recent trend of Civlikes making civilizations fungible skinsuits as the natural outcome of Civ's fundamental design to civilizations. Sure, it was fine when it was just goofy fun around pop history, but distilling the idea of civilization down to a few specific cultural expressions in specific moments in time as the main delineating factor for civilizations was always going to lead to becoming Songhai as Egypt when certain bioleninists realized that people more often learn more about history from games like these than actually reading books.
Humankind was a massive bomb for doing exactly this, and I say this as someone who played in the beta and was initially impressed. Millennia was dead on arrival for not even bothering to make the civs have any meaningful inherent qualities, and I'm not going to hold my breath on Ara: History Untold, which is coming out next month. The only new civlike I've played since the start of the decade that I would call an improvement on the Civlike genre would be Old World, and that has the advantages of being very limited in its scope and being made by Soren Johnson, Civ 4's lead.
There's an untapped market demand for an essentialist take on the Civ formula; virtually every major historical Civ 4 mod (Realism Invictus, History Rewritten, C2C) builds on what makes Civilizations actually distinct from one another, and Civ 5's Vox Populi is going to be integrating the 4UC submod into its modpack to make playing as civs feel even more distinctive. But civilizational essentialism is also very unsexy in current year, so I doubt any major studio will try to do it.
Humankind was a massive bomb for doing exactly this, and I say this as someone who played in the beta and was initially impressed. Millennia was dead on arrival for not even bothering to make the civs have any meaningful inherent qualities, and I'm not going to hold my breath on Ara: History Untold, which is coming out next month. The only new civlike I've played since the start of the decade that I would call an improvement on the Civlike genre would be Old World, and that has the advantages of being very limited in its scope and being made by Soren Johnson, Civ 4's lead.
There's an untapped market demand for an essentialist take on the Civ formula; virtually every major historical Civ 4 mod (Realism Invictus, History Rewritten, C2C) builds on what makes Civilizations actually distinct from one another, and Civ 5's Vox Populi is going to be integrating the 4UC submod into its modpack to make playing as civs feel even more distinctive. But civilizational essentialism is also very unsexy in current year, so I doubt any major studio will try to do it.
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How do you watch a game like Humankind totally fail to usurp your biggest franchise and then have a knockoff version of it make it through committee as the next installment of said franchise?
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- Jan 3, 2017
Humankind could've been successful (not Civ killing successful mind you) if it had gotten any meaningful support after release. I still play Humankind and years later it's still buggy, unbalanced and has just the worst AI. Such a waste of some good ideas.
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- Aug 12, 2024
This is giving me flashbacks to when Korea was revealed in Civ 6 and Firaxis had to unlist the international release video and then redesign Seondeok because the trailer's comments were full of angry Koreans talking about how Seondoek was an awful choice and looked like a Filipino.
(Sorry for doubleposting)
The very first dlc released for Humankind was Cultures of Africa, about half a year after launch, followed a few months later by Cultures of Latin America. That they plowed ahead with that instead of immediately shifting gears after the feedback started pouring in about how their fundamental design philosophy was flawed should speak for itself about Amplitude's priorities.
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- Dec 15, 2022
I guess I'm sticking with Civ5
This look bland and retarded even for a newish Civ game. Civ6 was tolerable but untill they fix the AI I'm not spending money on it.
This look bland and retarded even for a newish Civ game. Civ6 was tolerable but untill they fix the AI I'm not spending money on it.
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- Jan 3, 2017
They also eventually add the Together we rule expansion with what might be the worst implementation of the world congress idea of any strategy game.
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- Oct 18, 2018
I've heard redditors insist that they cannot fix the AI, because it's been the same AI since the beginning, and since every single strategy game has the exact same AI.
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- Aug 12, 2024
I found Civ 6 tolerable on launch. Graphics aside, the game felt like a sidegrade to Civ 5. There were a lot of cool ideas in it, some of which were just reintroduced features or inspired by mods, but if Firaxis had just taken some of those and put them into a third expansion for Civ 5 I don't think I would ever had a reason to get 6. Each major expansion and update to 6 just managed to add in a layer of bloat that squandered the potential of the launch.
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UtadaWasabi2
kiwifarms.net
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IDK, Ara History Untold and Old World looks better but haven't played either the two.
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- Aug 12, 2024
At the very least wait for it to release and read some player reviews before deciding. If you did enjoy Humankind you'll probably like it more than most Civ fans.
I'll probably get Ara when it comes out, but Old World isn't comparable to Humankind or what Civ VII is shaping up to be. It's an era and region-locked Civlike (Antiquity to early Migration Period, only Classical Near Eastern and European civs) with its largest outside influence being CK2. It's very well made too, but the difficulty will catch you by surprise if you don't grasp the learning curve quickly.
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- Jun 12, 2020
Might sound old but I still have a special love for CIV 3. I remember spending hours rebuffing and eventually conquering Persia that had taken over Asia and Europe all while listening to the Modern Era soundtrack.
I did make a few mods though by making my cruise missiles invincible and adding a transport capacity to my Aegis cruisers effectively making them guided missile cruisers which was the key to breaking through Persia forces.
I did make a few mods though by making my cruise missiles invincible and adding a transport capacity to my Aegis cruisers effectively making them guided missile cruisers which was the key to breaking through Persia forces.
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- Jan 22, 2024
So they have it that you change Civilizations per era, because as they said, they don't like having early game Civs and late game Civs. But you can't change the leader, so what's stopping there being early game leaders and late game leaders? It shows that the leader has a skill tree that they can develop, and this courtesy couldn't just be done to the civilization?
It feels like they Identified something they THOUGHT was a problem, (IMO, early game vs late game Civs was a feature not a bug as it allowed some Civ's strategy to "Snowball" and some Civ's strategy to "Scale" but whatever) fixed the problem by having level playing field each era, then created the problem AGAIN but not having the leaders change, and then fixed the problem a completely different way with a skill tree.
Granted I obviously haven't played it yet but I don't see how they can make the leaders not be "early game leaders" and "late game leaders" which they really don't want to have for some reason.
Talking about all this made me want to play another game of Civ III tonight.
Also if were posting Civ music this shit was always my jam.
It feels like they Identified something they THOUGHT was a problem, (IMO, early game vs late game Civs was a feature not a bug as it allowed some Civ's strategy to "Snowball" and some Civ's strategy to "Scale" but whatever) fixed the problem by having level playing field each era, then created the problem AGAIN but not having the leaders change, and then fixed the problem a completely different way with a skill tree.
Granted I obviously haven't played it yet but I don't see how they can make the leaders not be "early game leaders" and "late game leaders" which they really don't want to have for some reason.
Talking about all this made me want to play another game of Civ III tonight.
Also if were posting Civ music this shit was always my jam.
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- Dec 15, 2022
The Civ AI is it's biggest issue.
It's completely retarded 90% of the time, the only way to make things challenging is to give it massive bonuses and free units on a regular basis but even then often it will just either sit there and do nothing or steam roll the entire map because they are 5 tech levels ahead of everyone else making the game either boring or impossible.
Human players are good but not even the best can beat a tank unit backed up by aircraft with archers and pike-men.
Civ needs to radically revamp both it's AI and it's difficultly issues before I will even consider giving them another dollar.
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- Mar 21, 2020
Allowing civilizations to play differently is bigotry, you entitled shitlord. All civs are valid and all eras are equal.
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- Jan 3, 2017
As my first Civ game, 3 will always have a place in my heart.
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- Sep 22, 2019
Are they still doing 1upt? (One unit per tile) Guarantee you half the problems of modern Civ AI stems from this retarded decision in V alone.