Reply With QuoteI'm just trolling Jon. I love working with him and I think he's doing an amazing job, but it is so much fun to give him grief.Originally Posted by Maniac
-Scott-
???
By the way, anyone else find it strange Civ5 is announced one day after the StarCraft beta?
I'm just trolling Jon. I love working with him and I think he's doing an amazing job, but it is so much fun to give him grief.
-Scott-
I'm pretty damn excited. Not that I think Civ 4 needed to be replaced, because I still play Fall From Heaven 2 every week or so, but because I love turn-based strategy games and will play almost anything in that genre.
Ah I didn't know you were a Firaxis employee.
You should have your username changed to "DeathMonkey FIRAXIS". ;)
I, like others it seems, am torn between "I still love Fall from Heaven and even the base BtS game", and the fact that I made an audible gasping noise that caused a coworker to look at me weird when I saw the thread title.
On the other hand, hexes? Bring it on, for sure.
Seriously? What is your major malfunction??? :)
To be fair, hexes have a long history with convoluted grognard wargames, and I can understand how the visceral reaction might be negative if one is not a wargamer of a certain generation ;).
My number one request for Civ V would be more significant differences and flavor variations between the nations.
I think the slight variations between nations in Civ 4 are pretty dull, really. IMO the radical differences in FFH and SMAC make for a much more entertaining experience that I think makes you feel more invested in the game.
Of course mainline Civ isn't in a fantasy world like FFH, and it doesn't have the narrow story focus of SMAC. But I don't think that matters. Basically, I want the nations different enough that a strategy that works well for one nation won't necessarily work for another, and I want to see the AI behaving noticeably differently from one nation to another. In Civ 4, there are lots of interesting ways to play and win, but most of them work just as well for any nation.
I think Revolution had somewhat more distinctive differences in nations at times, especially early on in the game, but after playing for a while, the differences sort of flatten out as history moves on. This may make some sense in terms of realism, but I think it still denatures the experience of playing the game.
Oh god i cant wait, i played the hell out of Civ IV!!
I want it NOW!
I'm very curious to see how the combat changes play out. At face value I'm dubious due to the game's time frame -- Civilization already suffers from plenty of micromanagement as a game progresses, and having more detailed combat seems likely to add to that...
Still, hexes! Maybe they'll even throw in a 12 pentagons, and go for a pseudo-spherical fullerene shape...
I think the obvious fix to micro heavy, attrition based combat is just to dramatically scale back the amount of seperate mobile armies your civilization can support.
If you only have 10-15 units it won't ever become as tedious as it could be with unstackable hundreds. Beef up the experience system and add something like the armouries/blacksmith unit upgrades from Total War and you can have varying military power but condensed into a less micro heavy format.
Yeah, that's how I'd go about it too, and it's pretty much the classic solution.
I'd be surprised to see Civ adopt such a drastic change though, and there are downsides as well. For example, with only a few units it's difficult to defend more than one front.
In a game where units move at such a laborious pace, this could be a real problem, as the multiplayer dynamics would be all about stabbing people when they're busy elsewhere. Historically speaking this obviously played a rule, but it wasn't quite so easy to do.
Fundamentally I see a real disconnect between having elaborate combat tactics and a time scale of 6000 years.
Late to the thread, but I just wanted to chip in my obligatory "Awesome news!" response. Reading through everyone else's posts makes me want to fire up Civ IV yet again. I suppose there goes my evening ... and the next ... and the one after that :)
Those screenshots remind me of nothing more than Settlers of Catan. Hexes with mountains, hexes with forests.... I hope there is a robber in Civ 5.
No he should change his name to FiraxisBoy* just like Charles is known as UbiBoy.
So, could you just hire Kael, so he can get cracking with his mod.
*Firaxismonkeyboy?
I wonder about this as well. If there is no unit stacking, then each army must be moved independently instead of moving the entire stack all at once. That really is a lot of clicking.
Thanks Dan. That is beautiful.
Oh, you Firaxis-guys, you couldn't let Stardock shine alone in 2010, could you?
Very excited. I'm happy to see them mixing it up and not just going for the safe sequel, and I love the idea of non-stacking armies spread across the map. Clearly there are micromanagement issues to be addressed, but as was mentioned above, I suspect they'll go the route of having fewer units (compared to Civ IV) in more discreet positions, rather than making the map larger to accommodate the same number of units as Civ IV, spread out.
it doesn't have be either/or on stacking - it can just be a cap. Either way, though, clearly in order to spread your army across the landscape you will have to move as many individual units as are necessary to accomplish the spreading.
This is a complete guess here, but from the screen shots, it looks like there are units with 2, 3 or 4 rows of guys there. Perhaps you can stack like units, and they get represented as a larger force?
Come on folks, lets play Speculate(tm) while we wait for this to come out.
It could be, but I doubt it. If they are going to shift the paradigm, I doubt that they'll do it in half measures. I'd put money on one unit per space, based on the features description and those screenshots.
I like the UI-light look of the game, too. The units are easily identifiable by their appearance, and presumably the number of guys indicates hit points.
The question will be how do they deal with stepping over your own units?
I don't have a problem with wargames. I even like some of them :D.
But i never liked hexes. I always found it too limiting in movement, i hated how you have to zigzag to move in some directions. :/
And speaking generally, they are an historic rest from boardgames, where they were needed. They are also not ideal in boardgames (hell, lots of wargames try to be the most detailed and realistic thing evar! and sure as hell it's isn't realistic to only move in 6 directions) but still they were used because you hadn't lots of options. But it's not the case with modern computers, with all that computer power which can be used for a more granular movement system.
You guys are reading a lot into the inclusion of hexagons. (Getting all grognard-drooly about facing and stuff, which would ruin Civ, IMHO.)
They may very well just be there to make diagonal movements and attacks easier to figure out, and nothing more...
Alright, I looking at one of the screenshots at the site, and it shows archers shooting another unit from across a lake. That really bugs me; I was hoping the game would resolve range combat in a more elegant and sensible way.
I am such a stodgy party pooper.
Last edited by Amurigo; 02-18-2010 at 01:01 PM.
What were you hoping for, Amurigo?
I am not sure. Maybe an adjacent hex-to-hex battle like a first strike attack, or an attack that has no retaliation. It just bugs me because here we have archers shooting across a lake that's, I dunno, 10~100 mi wide?
If you have a turn-based game you need some kind of discrete movement grid, and hexes are definitely more realistic than squares because the movement distance per step doesn't change by a factor of 1.4 depending on which direction you go. You only have edge transitions which makes for a much cleaner system than having alternating edge and vertex transitions.
Hate to tell you but no combat in any Civ game was ever to scale... the series always mixed tactical combat with a strategic settlement map.
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