Reply With Quote... What is the feature most people would want to pick it up for?
It blows my mind that they can release a $99 collector's edition without the feature most people would want to pick it up for. It's not as if I can play with those figurines when I'm playing an actual game of Civ V.
... What is the feature most people would want to pick it up for?
some extra in game content of course!
I believe it would be unaffected. In my extremely limited experience, it's not uncommon for game studios to streamline their workforce (lay people off) toward the tail end of a major project. Not saying it's a good thing nor something that shouldn't be paid attention to, just a typical practice.Originally Posted by ChrisPal
No. No. No.
I mean if its a mod thing, more power to em.
I've never been lucky enough to play a game of Civ where the winner is still in doubt by the time I arrive at the modern age. So the modern age has always been the least interesting to me. To make Mechs useful they'll have to create a very finely balanced and paced game.
Tony
Why stop at Space Marines? Lets add elves, dragons and Klingons while we're at it.
Civilization has always, in a loose sense, been about rewriting history, adding fantasy elements and a significant future era would turn it in to a different game. It could very well be a good game, but it wouldn't be Civ.
Your memory is good because yes it did. Why has it not been done since? Well, besides the fact that Civ 2 ToT relied on Z axis maps to move units between worlds. Not exactly easy to do with the 3D world in Civ IV I admit.
I agree to a point. However, there's a distinct difference between adding sci-fi elements (things that could be) and adding fantasy elements (things that never were). One belongs in a possible timeline while the other doesn't.
Mechs are silly. I love them as a fictional device, but they don't make any sense in real world terms. We'll never see them outside of weekend LARPing by multimillionaires.
Also, it's not really a "distinct difference," unless you think that a mech being a machine enhances its plausibility.
Actually, thats exactly what I mean. It *could* be made. It's a possible sample from the future (although I agree it's unlikely). You can't introduce dragons (or drakes, in your honor ;) and elves to human history and make the same claim. That's a pretty large difference.
I'm not so sure.
So ... giant bipedal war machines are realistic but a world with gigantic saurians or people with pointed ears is clearly impossible? Because clearly you can build anything out of metal, but not even the most radical futurist has never imagined molding flesh?
It's not about whether technology can create something or not, but whether it makes any sense in the game. Rampaging giant dinosaurs would certainly make sense if Civ5 were to include some kind of Jurassic Park building, but not otherwise. Pointy ears are obviously completely irrelevant without the whole fantastic alternate history and magical abilities that define elves, so elves are out. Robotic walkers for use in war are already being tested, however, and they are certainly no more unrealistic than sending a space ship to Alpha Centauri.
Okay, that is super-creepy.
You did mention Warhammer 40k though, a setting with far more fantasy than just mechs. But more importantly, Civ has always focused on the past, and a greater focus on the future would make the past less significant.
Small quadrupedal (or hexapedal etc.) robots like Big Dog that are used for things like recon, bomb disposal, materiel transport, etc? Sure. But those sorts of devices would have no use at all as Civ units.
What everyone means by a "mech" and wants as a Civ unit is a machine that 1) is giant, 2) is bipedal, 3) has heavy armaments such as missiles and 4) looks super-awesome!!!! And those kind of mechs are pure fantasy for battlefield deployment in the real world.
Even if you managed to build one that didn't collapse under its own weight and had enough power to run for more than a couple of hours, you'd still run into a host of issues. Bipedalism is a notoriously terrible form of locomotion; not only does it put a lot of stress on the knee joints and backbone, but it's extremely unstable. Mechs would tend to topple over, and would either be helpless if they did or need some complicated and costly method of getting up. Furthermore the basic body design of a mech, with a ton of exposed area, ensures it would always be under-armored compared to any conventional tank design.
So even if you could build a giant bipedal mech, you wouldn't, because it makes no sense. It's designed to look cool, not be effective.
The only place you'll ever see a giant bipedal mech fighting is in fiction. Putting one in vanilla Civ would be like putting in the Batmobile--yes, it looks cool, and yes, it has some tenuous connection to reality (after all, you can go to the auto show and see a "real" Batmobile.) But it has no place in a game that sticks to unit types grounded in reality and day-after-tomorrow speculation.
Stop trying to argue sense in a game where a bunch of spearmen can kill a battleship.
(I'll never forget my first Civ game!)
Alright, I challenge you to point out where I said "realistic," "gigantic saurians," or "people with pointed ears." Nice strawman, but no dice ;)
Anyway, my original post on this topic was meant to convey that I can understand the desire for Firaxis to include a bit more of the future. If we're able to alter history throughout the millenia and guide some random civilization to dominance, why not allow a glimpse into some fanciful version of the future?
Would mechs be more important than archers? Only if they were facing eachother.
If countless games of Civ have tought me anything, it's that every stage has its own "best units" and early gameplay leads to future success. Extending the game further into the future wouldn't make the earlier portion of the game any less important, but it would expand the focus.
Some people wouldn't like that, others may find the franchise more interesting. It's a choice with benefits and tradeoffs, either way. No matter what, it's Civilization.
Sometimes the game could just model a mechincal failure of the unit in question, thus always making sure there is a slight odds of something bad happening.
This isn't unrealistic at all.
Well if you want to get technical, the US military has used mechs. At least prototypes for the maintenance of those fancy nuclear planes they had planned on. My google foo is failing me but Gizmodo had an article on them awhile back, they had tracks instead of legs but they did have arms.
We also use plenty of robots in Iraq, not quite of the fully autonomous variety for war making but what about in the next 50 years?
I don't really see whats wrong with adding some sci-fi features for the future periods. Am I supposed to be using my 20th century tanks well into the 21st century?
Last edited by Morberis; 07-10-2010 at 09:52 AM.
Whenever I play around with the mech, I'm constantly doing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acYDNlMYAaI
I think you guys will enjoy it.
-Scott-
QFTMFT
Every time in Civ Rev on my iPhone when the Pikeman army destroys my Tank army leads to a major bout of cursing. Exactly how does a group of guys wielding long wooden sticks with dinner knives on the end stop my 50 MPH tank with a massive gun on a rotating turret and 6 inches of steel armor?
Ah, finally an opportunity to air my Phalanx vs Tank theory!
I rationalise it in a very simple way: by the time you get to 2010 AD, that obsolete Phalanx unit doesn't really represent spearmen. Rather, it represents a rag-tag, half-trained militia with scrounged AK-47s and the odd RPG. So when the Phalanx defeats a Tank, it might be a Black Hawk Down moment, but it's not a High Crusade moment.
Exactly. Phalanxes don't exist in the modern world, it's an abstraction, when my tank loses to one (like 1 time in 100 or whatever) the image in my mind is of guys lobbing molotov cocktails from buildings.
Totally agree with HumanTon on the mech being stupid. I'd love to see Civ go into the future, I'd love to see science fiction in the next civ game, but giant mechs aren't something the military would build if it could. Small mechanized suits for infantry, sure.
Autonomous drones, deadly nano bots, orbital lasers, SkyNet -- awesome and way more plausible.
Wait, I thought Mechs were established as canon for historical abstraction games by their inclusion in Empire Earth's Digital Age? I think they were called Cybers in that game, but they were clearly Mechs.
The first Civilization had fusion power, SDI defense, and the cure for cancer. If those things can exist in the Civilization universe, so can mechs. Besides, it's already been hinted that the so called special unit will require some sort of combination of events or techs so they're not likely to be seen every game.
Well, so long as we're getting into that gray area, how about adding a Dalek research tech to the (Exceedingly Rare) random events rotation, which would be bundled with a possible disaster, optionally linked to espionage, of Dalek Independence!, which would in turn grant a city a 25% possibility of generating (or attracting) a Time Lord Great Person. But I guess the only way such forlornly hopeful ideas could possibly be considered by anyone would be if someone like the CivFanatics folks wanted to do it.
Oh I love that.
It seems that if Firaxis understands the players, they'll make it possible to gracefully end a game pre-future (or have an alternate advancement for those that don't like the mech concept). They seem to have plenty of options in Civ4, at least, for making the game play as you liked.
I found it rather dull in Civ4 to reach modern to early future and not be able to advance anything beyond that, but I understand people wanting Civ to be historical and reality based. I like options that give the player control over how they want to play the game, to get the most enjoyment out of it.
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