Bay 12 Games Forum

Anyway, it is me or does it feel like our actions are entirely without consequence. So far, everything that happened has had no effect whatsoever on other gods at all.

...Yeah, pretty much. That's unfortunate.

That seems to me at least because not many gods have competing populations. I'll be solving that - bringing them into conflict, that is.

Ideally, you wouldn't need to solve it.

You do know that DF dragons don't have wings, right? Standard ones don't, anyway.

((And yet, cave dragons do. Nonfunctional, but still.
It's more likely a holdover from when flying dragons caused AI issues, IIRC, than anything else.))

Is it still called Pteromerhanophobia if the pilot may be trying to kill you?

((Depends. Are you afraid of flying, or of the pilot's flying?))

You approach the roof you left Angel on and begin slowing down and preparing to land.
You seem to have misjudged your rate of descend, for you descend too rapidly. The spaceplane bounces as its suspension tries to absorb the force of the impact. You can hear and feel metal bending and breaking somewhere below you and can see various red lights lighting up around the cockpit. Let's hope you didn't break anything important.
Good thing you were wearing your seatbelt.

((...I really hope you didn't land on Angel. Wait, she's dead.))

Perhaps you should reconsider your tactics then? Stop facing the bosses alone (or in this case near hand-aimed artillery)? I'd say get some points on the combat stats related to your fighting style but you need to get some points first in order to do that. Remember, you're a glass cannon. To use an RPG analogy, fighters in the front, mages in the back.

((The first time, I didn't have much choice. The second time, I had an escape plan which...kinda failed.))

Congratulations. You are now the only player in this mission to have been desynchronized. Twice.

((He's the only player in any mission to have been desynchronized twice.))

Not really sure. I've been thinking about doing something similar with the Challenge game mode, but I'm thinking of removing it.
Sounds like it could get messy fast. Especially if someone manages to get a pair of kills that makes them essentially unbeatable by combining the right powers. Of course, that could be considered smart strategic thinking... Hmmm... I'll think about it.

((Here's one thing to consider.
Assume that all characters' combat abilities are determined 50% by things that get stolen and 50% by things that don't, and that everyone starts at equal strength. Let's say there's six--Alice, Bob, Carol, Dan, Eve, and Fred. Dan kills Fred, making Dan half again as strong as anyone else. This makes it harder for Carol to kill Dan, and easier for Dan to kill Eve. Let's say that while Dan kills Fred and evades Carol, Bob kills Alice. Now, we have Carol at her original strength, minus whatever she lost to fighting, while Bob is half again as strong and Dan is twice the strength of any. Dan and Bob would naturally fight each other; without help from Carol, who doesn't want to face the wrath of Dan, Dan will probably win, meaning that Carol is pretty much doomed. If Carol does help, though, Bob will be able to kill Carol just as easily, unless she somehow steals the final blow. In this scenario, and similar ones, whoever gets the first kill or two is going to win, barring extreme luck or a good combination of abilities.
Now, things get even worse when alliances come into play. Let's say that the previous scenario occurs, except that Alice and Eve agree to work together. They easily take down Carol, with Eve getting her power, while Dan kills Fred. Bob is nicely doomed, unless maybe he can work with Dan; Alice and Eve would press their advantage, trying to kill Dan ASAP. As you can see, whoever forms an alliance has an almost certain chance of victory, unless their partner does (or, again, luck or chance comes into play).
It's a decent idea, but it needs work.))

((Of course, how could I fuck up the plot otherwise?))

((My dad screwed up my plots by simple lateral thinking. Usually, this involved some clever plan, or allying the enemy, but he sometimes subverted my planning there with things like "No, I won't talk to the antagonist or be stealthy or clever or anything, I'll just kill all his guards."))

Matter converter Amps/Manipulators. All they need is matter, any matter. They could take dirt and turn it into uranium. Hell, Miyamoto created C4 from dirt. Traditional mining has a lot of waste material, whether it's oreless rock from between veins, or slag from the smelting process. With a Matter Converter Automanipulator, the shove all that in one end, and get high grade hull plates out the other. Material and weight don't matter to the UWM. They have the tools to circumvent the problems modern space exploration faces.

Why waste the dirt? Even shaving a mere 1% of the required mass off of a ship means that an entity the size of the UWM can get dozens if not hundreds more warships.
And, of course, that's assuming that the UWM uses mass converter space magic extensively in spaceship construction.

I didn't think logic would prevail.

Hey!

((God help us, there is no way this is ending well))

This is new?

...

Did you really read through the entire thread just to post that?

I found the rest of the discussion interesting, too.

Jesus, GWG, why did you make a megapost replying to FOUR YEAR OLD posts?

...
Because I had stuff to say.

Anyhow:
Re: Sieges
Sieges are fairly straightforward. If you use, y'know, siege units. If you're using infantry, you're basically telling a bunch of soldiers to charge the walls with ladders, while under defender fire. Or hacking at the gate with whatever they are armed with. Sure, it will eventually work if you throw enough bodies at it, but it's hilariously inefficient.
What you're supposed to do is bombard the defenders into submission, then march in triumphantly with the infantry or armor to take care of the actual assuming control part.
During the sieging part, the role of melee troops is to shield the ranged attackers from enemy infantry and taking out ranged units which could damage them. For small cities, the whole siege won't last longer than like three turns.
I believe the change was partially caused by the attempt to make cities more quality over quantity, so that you wouldn't have some guy who forgot doing research marching into the capital of modern-age country with his warriors and taking over the city because the defender forgot to put troops in it because that would be obviously pretty silly.

The problem is that siege units are not exactly the lowest-tech units. War being impossible until the medieval era...doesn't make sense, from a gameplay or a simulationist perspective. Also, they're slow enough that by the time they get there, the units I've sent to soften up the cities are blocking the way. This wouldn't be a problem without the one-unit-per-tile restriction; however, combining the two means that in order to wage war, I need to either waste tons of time with hordes of archers and pikemen dealing with the unguarded city, or else delay the war so the siege engines can come in. It's just not fun.
Another issue with your description is that the same problems arise when the city has no walls, or no...you know...defenders. If there are actually defenders? Sure, I need to kill them. But once I do, there's the city itself, which has way more health than any other unit. What, am I killing everyone in the city before taking it? And that's not getting into the times I've whittled down a city to 0 health but couldn't take it because it regenerated its health before I could.
I've been more or less doing the "bombard the defenders into submission" part, but having to take dozens of turns doing so to an undefended city is just stupid. And you know what? If there was zero military presence, a bunch of trained guys with stone axes could (briefly) take over. Also, you require A. one civilization with modern technology; B. one nearby civilization without anything but basic technology; C. the former to fail to defend its cities; and D. the latter to manage to get to said cities. This isn't going to happen, ever. When the circumstances required to have an issue come up are less likely to occur in the game than the resultant consequences would be if that happened IRL, it's not a problem.

BELATED INCOMER'S MEGAPOST!

Ah, well yes you need to buy multiple copies to play multiplayer online. Why wouldn't you?

Civ I-IV could be played in multiplayer hotseat, with just one copy of the game Well, I know II-IV could be, and assume I had this functionality as well.

Another change is that cities will resist hostile invasion even if undefended.

Which is a decent enough idea, but when the cities are tougher and faster-regenerating than military units...well, it's easier to destroy a fleet of tanks than to capture a city.
That* is probably my biggest complaint about Civ V, with "no unit stacking" coming in as a close second. Naturally, the problems aggravate each other, with no unit stacking making it hard to concentrate much firepower on a city and the city issues making it hard for my unstacking units to advance further into the enemy empire.
*The implementation issues specifically mentioned, not the concept.

Another nice new addition: You no longer have to faff around with transport ships. Once you research Optics, any unit can move out into shoreline tiles, and another tech lets units cross oceans.
Now these units are defenseless on the water, so must still be escorted.

Regardless, I do like this. Probably my favorite feature of Civ V.
What I like less is that point when I have ships which are less effective at sailing than horsemen.

compared to what civ 4 was to civ 3, civ 5 seems to be an huge leap for the series.

Hell, compared to (what I remember of) Civ II to Civ IV, it's a huge leap.
I can't help but wonder how much of to was changed just to change it.

Between all these disparate alterations, Civ V is going to be the biggest departure since Alpha Centauri.

From what I know of Alpha Centauri, I'd say Civ V's change is bigger.

Only thing that really has me concerned is The Great Wall. Apparently it slows people in your cultural borders, which is absolutely overpowered since it apparently never obsoletes.

Nor does it make sense.

Muz, that's not really fair. You're comparing games made with the limitations of 1991 and 2000 to games made in 2010.

That's part of it, but I daresay that anyone who started being in the business a couple decades ago could stand to have some new blood and thought mixed into his game designs. If nothing else, it prevents the typical "the same with better graphics" complaints.

You get one and frankly I never liked how wonders became obsolete too much anyhow. Not for strategy reasons but for "I built it, why are you taking it away?" reasons.
Though Civilization has sometimes boiled down to the Civ that managed to get a Wonder since for some you could combo Wonders to advance many times faster then your opponent.

I think you answered your own question.
Obsolete Wonders mean that it's that much harder for the civs that dominate early on to continue to dominate later, that much easier for lesser civs to catch up.

As for making it useless. An alternative that I would have liked is if its ability lessened or changed. I mean sure Shakespeare's theater is no longer relevant (Ignoring that it is the most anti-historical wonder in the entire series) but maybe later on it should increase chances of a cultural great or spread culture.

IIRC, obsolete wonders still give Culture.

Well, what I was getting at is "building the Great Wall means establishing a cultural heritage of defense against outsiders, which presumably will continue to use additional technologies as they become available".

I mean, even in previous Civ games, once you built the Great Wall it's not like it instantly appeared along certain tile boundaries, and then stopped protecting outer cities once you expanded.  Wonders are mutable over time, they're symbolic.

No, Wonders are one, single thing. Patterns are what you're talking about. A civilization that makes it hard for enemies to get through is one thing; a civilization that builds one great wall is another.

Yeah, the 1 unit per tile limitation in the new civ has made choke points a key to defensive victory.

On the other hand, it makes it impossible to take cities unless you can get really strong units to the front lines. And makes moving troops to the enemy a hell of a lot harder. If I wanted war to require micromanagement, I would play Dwarf Fortress instead.

Hot-seat games were always good fun.  We chose that over LAN most of the time.

Indeed. It's also helpful if you only have one computer.

It's actually possible to play hotseat? How do you guys handle that phase when someone inevitably messes up early on and wants to restart? The initial "end turn" phase always felt like way too much of a grind for me.

We dealt with it. Usually with one guy checking that the others didn't want to fiddle with anything and hitting End Turn.

I do not think cities are that hard to take over, you just need to bomb the crap out of them and support your ranged attacked with melee units. I was in the modern era last night, assulting a country across the sea. My ships cleared the beaches for my ground units, my ground units cleared the anti aircraft for my interceptors, my interceptors cleared the interceptors for my bombers and my bombers blasted the cities for my ground troops. It was awesome.

1. It's not hard, sure, but it's a pain.
2. What about pre-airplane wars? Or land wars?

the introduction movie looks great!

That it does. It's sometimes almost impossible to tell that it's CG.

The combat is far and away better than the stack rush of Civ 4, and probably the most improved feature. Position, movement and variety of units actually matter somewhat. Unfortunately the AI seems unable to deal with it (but we all know how unreasonably hard decent tactical AI is).

And, of course, most players have about the same level of knowledge in how to deal with it. I'm still not sure how one can wage war in a timely manner, and it's a pain to manage war when taking a single city takes a dozen turns at best.
...So I guess it wouldn't be so bad if undefended cities weren't so tough.

The other major improvements from my brief playing are the new social system replacement for civics, you get much more choice and each choice is minor enough than most aren't 'must haves' but it's all about how they synergise (that's not even a word is it), and the streamlining of the happiness / tax / research systems.

IMHO, the inability to change what social branches you grow is a bit of a pain, as is reducing the link between social policies and what they represent in a simulationist sense.

How many real-life countries have ever controlled that much land?

There's Australia, of course. But that's the smallest continent, the most sparsely-populated, and between almost nonexistent soil fertility, its arid climate, and its infamous wildlife, Australia is objectively the second-worst continent to live on (it beats Antarctica by a wide margin, but well...it's Antarctica). So there's that.

Fun fact: Canada is bigger than the US. The US is "only" the third largest nation (by land area).

My only objection to that is that the song does have lyrics already, they're just not in English.

Bugs me too.
Of course, being just the Lord's Prayer in Swahili, they're not original lyrics, but...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

I. HATE. THE. RNG!!!!

So here's the story. Large map. Continents. Epic mode modded so that research is 175% longer instead of 125%. 15 civs. 13 civs spawned on one continent (and the small islands around it). 2 civs spawned on the other one. I'm on the one with the 13 civs.

So for 500 turns (1880 AD), the 13 of us were duking it out over our reasonably large continent and surrounding islands. We only just researched riflemen. Then all of a sudden, Iroqouis helicopters and mechanized infantry start landing all over the goddamn place and killing every one of us. When I went to check how the bleeding heck the Iroqouis could do such a thing, turns out they had FOURTY (40!!!!) cities on the other continent after wiping out Washington. To compare, the max any of us had at the time before the invasion of doom was 10.

500 turns and 16 hours completely wasted

That's hilarious.

That sounds rather cool though.
Like if no one had discovered America and Europe kept fighting amongst itself and then the Aztecs nuke everyone.

Wouldn't have happened. The Americas are just too low indomesticable species and are too north/south aligned to allow for rapid transmission of crops and ideas and such. Eurasia would always have had the edge.
And if I had to pick any of the Pre-Colombian civilizations to be the likeliest to advance to that state, I'd go with the Inca.

To be fair, that's just exactly what happened in real life, except the Iroquois started in the other continent.

And the invaders weren't a quarter as unified.

From a game design point, this railroad/harbor thing is kind of dumb, but I really don't know a good way to fix it. Give harbors more upkeep when railroads are discovered? Make the bonus reliant on building some other building you create after railroads are invented that has a bigger upkeep?

Make the game only give the special railroad bonuses to cities connected by rails?

Different in Alpha Centauri though. Associated a lot of "human" qualities with Lady Diedre if you know what I mean.

...I thought I did, until you added "if you know what I mean".

I'm not sure how much I agree with you there. Playing as the Hive, I often found myself allied with Zakharov, feeling that we're similar enough in means though we may have different end goals. It just ruins it when Zakharov tells me, "I've had enough of your brutal nihilism!" and declares war.

Zakharov doesn't strike me as nihilist in any but perhaps the technical sense...and probably not that "Brutal nihilism," perhaps something like militant Randism, is something that no one save the brutal nihilist himself is likely to like...

Regardless, both societies are nihilistic in nature and based on the whole "end justifying the means" concept. As much as it makes sense that Zakharov would disagree with the Hive's system, it makes next to no sense for Zakharov to insult the Hive for its nihilism and invade it after years of technology trading and brotherhood.

That's like saying that it makes no sense for Muslims to attack Christians for their Christianity because they both follow the same God. The problem Zakharov has isn't with "the ends justify the means," so much as the specific ends. He's a less extreme/brutal nihilist.

The thing with Alpha Centauri is that all the different philosophies have their own merits and downsides. The Hive was Yang's own personal power splurge as much as the University was Zakharov's own personal mad scientist operation. Yang does not do it merely for personal power and ruthlessness, he does it because he actually believes in what he's preaching as does every other leader. The Hive is based on a philosophy that the individual must always succumb to the masses for the benefit of the entire hive, with no mere individual mattering at all in comparison to any benefit to the hive as a whole.
It does suppress intellectualism, but it's really the kind of "Let's just get everything done as soon as possible" focus with no regard for the pain caused to an individual in comparison to whatever benefit received by the human race as a whole. Anyway, let's get back on the topic of Civ 5, which I'm installing right now.

And Zakharov doesn't like that brutal aspect of the Hive's nihilist tendencies.

Oh there is one another thing that bugs me. Research, best way to do it is to conquer huge amount of cities. Smaller nations have hard time catching up. I liked how it was done in EUIII. More realistic in my opinion, let's look at actual history, relatively small countries like Great Britain or Spain grew to be global super powers thanks to advanced technology. Hopefully someone will mod it in.

1. Spain was fairly large for European nations, wasn't it?
2. Cross-nation tech spreading is a lot more common IRL than in Civ.

I have found all of the narrations and quotes to be lack luster. Even with Nimoy reading them they would have fallen short. In Civ 4 it seemed like all the tech quotes pertained directly to the technology or to the era the technology was created. For example, internal combustion (or whatever) in Civ 4 had Henry Ford saying "You can have the Model T in any color you want, so long as it is black." Directly referencing the event or someone important to the event. In Civ 5 the quote is "Any man who can safely operate a car while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves" by Albert Einstein. In Civ 5 the quotes just seem to reference whatever it is you researched. Kind of disappointing.

Agreed, it's annoying.

While I agree that the tech quotes are lackluster, this rates about a 2 on my 1-10 importance scale. 

Agreed.

The combat more than makes up for it IMHO

Disagreed. See above.

I need to prefect my early game strat. I have trouble with everything, wonders, money, culture. It seems like I do nothing correctly except war.

That's amusing to me, because war's the thing I have the most trouble with.

Quote from: Urist McDepravity on October 05, 2010, 11:26:04 pm

Oh, and that monolith with achievements. Sure it was doing nothing, but I still enjoyed getting them ahead of enemies.

Beat the hell out of Civ 2's throne room, that's for damn sure.  Nothing's as cool as Civ 1's palace builder though

*looks that up*
*tries a different set of search terms*
I guess that's kinda neat. Better than the vaguely similar thing in...Civ III or IV, don't remember which.

According to one prominent Civ IV modder (the lead on RiFE), Civ V is far easier to modify than IV, but there are certain impediments to producing overhauls. Overhauls are the mods we most often notice and talk about.

So, you can add/change individual units and civs, but you can't change how gameplay works in any meaningful way?

Not to mention the FFH2 mod for Civ 4 turns it into one of the best and most fun strategy games I've ever played.  I actually think FFH2 has ruined any other turn based strategy game for me, because it's -that- good I always find myself wishing other games had certain aspects from FFH2 included.  :-P

I should look into that mod if I ever get ahold of Civ IV.

Quote from: Sowelu on March 13, 2012, 08:10:08 pm

Well, clearly atheism itself will be a religion; witness the "reason" civics and the USSR.

 

Indeed.

Yes really he should have said he prefers Civ 4, with the two massive expansions and all the bug fixes, to Civ 5. In which case I would agree with him.

So, you want to compare to the buggy version?

Greece, stop fucking about >.>
If you ask me to join a war, do not dive out of it the moment I join! Now everyone thinks I'm a warmonger!

Either the AI is stone dumb or secretly brilliant and evil.

I hate steam now. WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU ADVERTISE THE WORKSHOP, LET ALONE RELEASE IT, IF ONE HALF OF THE USERS(The Mac users, to be percise) CAN'T USE IT?

"In the real world, the vast, vast majority (85% to 90%) of personal/home computers run some version of Microsoft Windows. In particular, the majority of engineers, accountants, self-employed people and teachers use Windows PCs. A fairly small number of geeks, a decently large number of data centers and supercomputer labs, and many, many scientists also run Unix-like systems, particularly Linux. This leaves Apple Macintoshes as the minority interest mainly of a small minority of college students, academics, and a number of "creative" types — artists, writers, musicians, etc."
Your facts are wrong.

Well, yeah.  That's kind of what happened in real life.  It's not like the America's were just empty.

Kind of. However, much of the Americas, plus Australia, Polynesia, Africa, northern Europe, and assorted other places never really felt the touch of civilization, whatever your definition, due to factors ranging from climate to soil quality to simply not having any domesticable species...none of which Civilization does, or should, support. If the real world worked like your suggested mod, every continent save perhaps Antarctica would have been full of civilizations, some developing faster or slower than others, but all being reasonably developed.

Because civ 5 is not an empire builder, it's a wargame.

With war being an annoying series of cities you need to whittle down the health of slowly.

honestly, the way theyre implemented they're just like "fuck you" victories. I turn them off every time I play.

I dunno. Seems like a certain quote about GalCiv applies...something about how such victories are like those missions where you need to hold the base for five minutes, except that it's "hold half the galaxy for five years". If you're failing, you're unlikely to get enough research/culture/whatever to win that way.
It's from this review thingy, which is currently undergoing server issues it seems...

---

TL;DR: The newest installment in the Civ series had some neat ideas, but I think they were rather clumsily implemented.
Also, is there a way around the difficulties I've had with waging war? You know, cities not really ever dying (seriously, why can't you march a military unit into an unguarded city anymore?) and not being able to move units into position as fast as they're produced.

We had a card that let us instantly heal pretty much all the damage we took, though. Hence my choice of that strategy.

Whoo, 100 replies.

I've been playing a bit of SMAX today, and I've appreciated a lot of it. The UI is...well, I'm unsurprisingly reminded of my days playing Civ II. Aside from that, I'm impressed with all but one thing: It keeps crashing. It crashed the first time after I tried to start the game, and then just now after I met and traded with Zakharov. Are crashes common, or is it an issue with my copy, or what?