Civilization V

[KevinC]

Well you can certainly do it with their ranged attack mechanics, not sure about melee though.

[Strollen]

Out of curiosity, has anyone heard whether they'll stay with the move=attack style of combat? That is, in order to attack, you are moving your army onto the tile of the opposing army without any option to attack and remain where you were originally (unless you have movement left to move yourself back). Is this standard or have they switched that up any with the addition of the no-stacks feature? From the footage I've seen so far, it looks like the attacking army always moves to the defeated army's tile.

I'm thinking it would be great to be able to attack>defeat enemy>remain where you are>but uses movement for the unit. Better for defending lines, of course. Perhaps being always on the defensive like I was in Civ4 has given me a reason to want that sort of ability.

I am guessing that you can use ranged attack to soften up a hex first. Then decide if you want to attack with your 'melee' units or not. I suspect that will retain the attack move paradigm. In classic wargame attacking a hex can make the unit vulnerable to counter attack because it is surrounded by 3 or 4 other hexes. I am curious if you can attack and withdraw like you can in Civ IV with cavalry or via roads, or will the presence of ZOCs stop it.

I am also curious for any of you AI experts out there will be easier or harder to write good AI for one unit per hex or stacking?

[Mind Elemental]

Do we know whether melee combat will still be "two units enter, one unit leaves" or will it be more likely that the combatants in a reasonably fair fight will both emerge alive, albeit damaged?

[Strollen]

Looking at the videos and based some other info. I am pretty sure that combat is celebrity deathmatch style :). I have no idea how ranged combat works.

[Therlun]

Do we know whether melee combat will still be "two units enter, one unit leaves" or will it be more likely that the combatants in a reasonably fair fight will both emerge alive, albeit damaged?

I really hope for a change of that deathmatch mechanic.

[Spoit]

Well, I mean, they introduced the ability to randomly withdraw in 4 for cavalry and upgraded units.

[BleedTheFreak]

Great video interview here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10339301.stm

Gameplay is being showed, not from a trailer but from someone manipulating the game in real time - looks fantastic. Nukes, naval combat, city management is shown, etc. Pay close attention to the sound design, it's noteworthy. Around 1:24 musketmen square off and the sound of the gunfire is incredible. I don't recall learning anything per se, but some of the concepts (like the navy) were talked about and shown at the same time.

Plus, you can see the Atzec guy screaming (in a dead language!) at you, which looks pretty awesome.

[Chris Nahr]

On the BBC? Well, that's a surprise! Looks like the cage deathmatches are indeed gone, both units can survive an engagement.

[UncleSmoothie]

the Atzec guy

Sigh.

(Thanks for the link to the video, though.)

[Shiroko]

I am also curious for any of you AI experts out there will be easier or harder to write good AI for one unit per hex or stacking?

Way harder, when you had stacks you can simply send stack of dooms. As a human player you wouldn't see this stack and say "Oh what a stupid AI" since most human players will do a similar thing.
Now think for yourself, using the new system you are going to think much more on your attack: Which units go in the front, which unit are vulnerable (When using stacks the best unit for defending the stack gets chosen for you)
It gets even worse, unit movement has doubled. Since basic AI is about checking all possible matches (And using some kind of heuristics to narrow the search) this means you now have much more possible moves to select. This require much more CPU or much more complicated heuristics.
All in all, this is a really big challenge. I think you will be able to point out stupid AI decisions which you would notice in previous Civ games.

(Don't worry though, I assume they have enough talented programmers to handle this so it will be good enough)

[foogla]

I hope there is a "Told Monty To Chill Out -1" modifier for diplomacy

[BleedTheFreak]

Sigh.

(Thanks for the link to the video, though.)

Yes, SIGH indeed, in my haste to share a video with everyone, I made a freaking TYPO. Good lord, how can I live with myself?

[UncleSmoothie]

Yes, SIGH indeed, in my haste to share a video with everyone, I made a freaking TYPO. Good lord, how can I live with myself?

It's not the typo, it's that you referred to Montezuma as "the Aztec guy". :-/

[KevinC]

Oh, my brain had completely translated the typo, I didn't notice it. I assumed he was complaining that you referred to him as "the Aztec guy" rather than "Montezuma"... which is equally as silly.

One thing that strikes me about this game is the production values. Sure, I know graphics, sound, etc are fluff and that gameplay is king, but I really appreciate quality audio. As a matter of fact, I would say that in a lot of games, audio is more important to me than the visuals.

I wonder what the budget for Civ V is looking like?

[BleedTheFreak]

It's not the typo, it's that you referred to Montezuma as "the Aztec guy". :-/

I doubt he gives a shit.
EDIT - You'll have to cut me some slack, I was in a rush to get the post made before I had to be on the road to get to work, I couldn't remember the name "Montezuma" at the time I was typing. A simple "thanks" would be fine, next time.

[UncleSmoothie]

Hey look it's that German guy



Relax bro, I'm just fucking with you. :)

[Midnight Son]

Unter glieben glauben globen!!!

[schurem]

[hitler voice]wir haben uns entschlossen das wir das neues spiel genennt civilization fünf prre-orrderren werden! also machen wir schnell und ohne zurrückblicken das click![/hitler voice]

[azzl]

If it wasn't for Russian guy, German guy would have won that big war that time.

They've been talking about moddability, but the approach to civ leaders would seem to make that pretty difficult from the standpoint of adding custom civs (Indonesia needs inclusion dammit. They're the archipelago Pirate faction of world history). It sounds like they are taking a Sims-like approach as well of hosting mods themselves...will it even be possible to install mods from, say, civfanatics? Is there going to be an Apple App Store arbitrary blessing and rejecting of mods for unclear reasons? Why can't I get past my irrational hatred of Steam?

[erikg88]

If it wasn't for Russian guy, German guy would have won that big war that time.

They've been talking about moddability, but the approach to civ leaders would seem to make that pretty difficult from the standpoint of adding custom civs (Indonesia needs inclusion dammit. They're the archipelago Pirate faction of world history). It sounds like they are taking a Sims-like approach as well of hosting mods themselves...will it even be possible to install mods from, say, civfanatics? Is there going to be an Apple App Store arbitrary blessing and rejecting of mods for unclear reasons? Why can't I get past my irrational hatred of Steam?

I had the same feeling about the leaderheads. It's strange -- the higher quality the source material, the higher quality mods have to be in order to not appear amateur hour. In some ways, modability means "end users can get pretty close to official material."

I'm sure civfanatics mods will be welcome, since I believe they mention in one of those videos integrating some of the "major fansites," of which civfanatics qualifies.

[skedastic]

CivRev is unique because it's under severe memory limitations due to the platform it's on. You can't allow the player the same amount of control over what size of world you're on.

Civilization 2 had a variety of maps, including really big ones, and ran on a 486 with 8mb of RAM. CivRev's design limitations, I would think, are designed to make it easy and quick to play particularly without a mouse and keyboard, not a result of limited memory.

I really hope Civ 5 does not borrow much, particularly in terms of scale, from Civ Rev.

[KevinC]

Civilization 2 had a variety of maps, including really big ones, and ran on a 486 with 8mb of RAM. .

You're going to compare a modern game with a game made in 1996?

All the art, the textures, models, everything is loaded into memory. On the Xbox360, the video and system memory are shared.

[skedastic]

You're going to compare a modern game with a game made in 1996?

Computers work pretty much the same way in 2010 as they did in 1996. The memory needed to track the state of the game on larger maps is not much more than that needed on smaller maps, so the claim that it's not feasible to allow largers maps in Civ Rev is not correct, as illustrated by the fact that similar games with much, much larger maps run just fine on platforms with much, much less memory. Maps are small and not variable in size in Civ Rev by design, not because the 360 or other platforms on which that game runs have less memory than a modern PC.

[porousnapkin]

You're going to compare a modern game with a game made in 1996?

All the art, the textures, models, everything is loaded into memory. On the Xbox360, the video and system memory are shared.

For a map that's essentially tile-based like Civ Rev, I really don't think memory would be an issue. You can load all the trees once, load all the textures once (if you look closely at the grass, hill, ice etc. texture they're probably not that big) and render them wherever you would like. If you're culling everything that's not in the frustum (view space), the size of the map really shouldn't matter for the most part for rendering and graphical system memory. In fact, I would imagine expanding it while using the same art assets would be a pretty insubstantial loss. Whatever AI related junk you have going on that will be more expensive based on the size of the world might be a bigger deal than art assets.

I think they're running up against that limit more with the Civilopedia which would explain why the load times were so bad every time you opened it. I agree with skedastic, it seems unilkely that it was a technical reason that would hold the map sizes back, but if it was a technical reason, I don't think it was due to art assets.

[Mind Elemental]

On the BBC? Well, that's a surprise! Looks like the cage deathmatches are indeed gone, both units can survive an engagement.

I think I missed that part - could you point it out, please? The combat still looked pretty all-or-nothing to me, but that could just be a factor of only the "Major Victories where one side is completely annihilated" making it into the video.

Actually, the bit of chrome that most impressed me wasn't the unit or world map or combat graphics -- it was the diplomacy screen. The scene with Montezuma -- the hopefully-authentic dialogue, the background, the body language -- made me think, "wow!"

[Tom Chick]

I imagine a lot of the demos show the AI units set up as speedbumps for the sake of brevity. But the combat is definitely *not* cage deathmatch. The idea seems to be fewer units that are more important, so you'll have the opportunity to pull back and heal injured units. Very Panzer General/Advance Wars.

Also, a fantastically thorough battle predicter so you can see what modifiers apply before you attack. W00t!

-Tom

[Jon Shafer]

Map size is intimately tied to memory. Those fancy heightmaps and such have to live somewhere, after all. Same deal with textures if you're doing any sort of blending and not just stamping stuff down. In the good old days you could just stick a lot of pieces together. Can't do that any more if you want a game that looks good.

Jon

[arakyd]

Here's what Brad Wardell has to say about the impact of memory limits on the design of a strategy game like Elemental:

Being a PC-exclusive game with a PC-exclusive engine means that we can assume that we have at least 1 gigabyte of memory to play with (the Xbox 360 tops out at 512MB and it has to share that with video textures).

So for this discussion, toss out the debates on the latest video cards versus what’s on a console and all that. Let’s consider the ramifications of having a gigabyte of memory to play with. What does that mean in terms of GAME PLAY?

1. It means that I can have lots of unique looking units. This matters because the player, at a glance, can distinguish one unit from another.
2. It means I can upgrade units in game and have them visually look different. This matters again because, players need to be able to see that this unit is different from that unit without having to click on something.
3. It means you can have a much wider range of creatures in the game. Think about that for a moment. Consider any recent games you’ve played. How many different types of creatures were there in it? Even in an RPG. How many? Not many right? That’s because it requires a lot of memory to juggle lots of different creatures.
4. It means you can have a lot of different types of buildings that are visually different. How many times in recent years have you played an RPG and entered a building or dungeon that was identical in nearly every way to every other dungeon or Inn or whatever? Why was that? Were they lazy? Was it budget? No. That’s not the question. The question was, was that game ALSO available for a console? Yes. It was memory.

Think about it. How many different units can be on the screen at once? The game has to support the worst case scenario. So, yeah. Designing for consoles makes a big difference. Not as big as designing for 3D in the first place, though.

[porousnapkin]

...heightmaps and such...

That's a good point, I hadn't thought about the memory required to for stitching areas together. I went back and looked at Civ Rev and it's much prettier than I remember. A heightmap for the whole world would certainly take up a lot of space.

Here's what Brad Wardell has to say about the impact of memory limits on the design of a strategy game like Elemental:
...
Think about it. How many different units can be on the screen at once? The game has to support the worst case scenario. So, yeah. Designing for consoles makes a big difference. Not as big as designing for 3D in the first place, though.

I don't know if that's totally appropriate though. I think the question is whether the size of the maps was due to the platform it was developed for instead of a design decision entirely independent of tech. No one is going to argue that memory limitations on consoles doesn't affect game design. It does all the time. Also, I don't think how many units are on the screen at one time is relevant (unless all of them are unique assets). That's more to do with the time it takes to render lots of objects which isn't really related to memory.

I guess it doesn't really matter, though. Civ Rev was an excellent game and I hope some of the stuff that worked well there carries over into Civ 5. I think the best part about Civ Rev was how simple and approachable it felt. One of the nice things about the UI design is that the game didn't look overwhelming from a distance. I found it easier to convince non-strategy gaming friends to give it as hot.

[Mind Elemental]

I imagine a lot of the demos show the AI units set up as speedbumps for the sake of brevity. But the combat is definitely *not* cage deathmatch. The idea seems to be fewer units that are more important, so you'll have the opportunity to pull back and heal injured units. Very Panzer General/Advance Wars.

Thanks! Yes, I was thinking that if they were going to model Civ 5's combat after those games, cage deathmatch combat would be a very odd feature to preserve from the previous games. :)