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This Christmas morning I hope to find under my tree a game called Civilization 3.
A game whose gameplay is so meticulously balanced you could stand it on the head of a pin in
a hurricane and walk away. Not a game designed to give the illusion of being able to
meticulously balance something that essentially remains the same. And with that I have
unburied my lead: SMAC-style SE has GOT TO GO.
Now, I know there are guys here at Apolyton who would torch me just for saying that. Be
that as it may, I have to get this off my chest. I am of course referring to the feature
made familiar in SMAC known as "Social Engineering." I have always felt one big reason why
SMAC falls short of all-time great status on most on-line lists is because of the SE
feature. Despite this for months here at Apolyton I have been astounded at the amount of
discourse that has gone into advocating this very feature in Civ 3.
Why is the SE system such a bummer? In a word? It's lazy. It can be reduced to something
beyond itself, something somebody did not quite come up with. Now, I'm not saying it isn't
in the ballpark of "fun." But Civ 2 was more than just "fun." I know people -- and so do
you -- very well-paid, all grown-up people -- say, lawyers -- who have spent valuable
billing hours trying to master the bizzare alchemy of Sid Meier's seminal game. But SMAC?
Eh... less. For whatever reason. But I'm saying one reason SMAC is "less" is because "SE"
is an uninspired and lazy feature.
The SE system is nothing more than an abstraction of the forces that are supposed to be
acting on your population. A better system than the SE model would be irreducible. In
fact, those forces that the SE model seeks to simulate would actually BE the better system.
Sure, the AI might know what the numbers are, say for a "Green" economy. But I want to know
what I did to CREATE that green economy -- besides clicking on the word "green" because "+2"
sounds good to me.
And yet others do not agree. Astoundingly, SE values for Civ 3 have been debated in the
past as though it were a given that SE would be a feature in Civ 3. There have been heated
debates over whether a Fascist State should give you +3 police or -2 happiness, or why
"animism" really ought to rate a +5 for social panic attack or WHATEVER. I look at these
debates and I think of passengers rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Their very
existence underscores the failure of SE. Don't get me wrong, it's not the micromanagement I
object to -- a word, which, let's admit, is just code for us anal retentive control freaks
-- no, that's much of the fun.
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Micromanagement I can dig. It's another word all together
nitpicky debates about nitpicky numbers and I don't trust it. These debates have been so
nitpicky that at least three separate wish lists had to be submitted from Apolyton to Firaxis
that evokes the essence of SE. And that word is... "nitpicky." SE is nitpicky. It breeds
due to the debators inability to reach any concensus on a bunch of numbers, plus or
minus 2. This indicates something is amiss. And in this case, that something is the fact
that SE is a work-around system for not being able to come up with a better model that gives
REAL game control over the forces that shape your civ's society.
To make an analogy -- Civ is chess. And the pawns of Civ 3 should be those irreducible game
forces that the player exerts on the game. If a player moves one of these "pawns," the
balance shifts fundamentally. SMAC, with it's "SE," is also like chess, only in SMAC the
"pawns" don't have to MOVE, the players merely change the values of the pawns. And maybe
that's interesting. To a point. But that point arrives fairly rapidly. In Civ 3, the
forces that act on society had better be as movable as pawns on a chess board. Their
balance visceral, immediate, sharp, responsive and consequential. SE statistics should be
"dramatized" on the game board, not represented by mere labels in a static window. Sid
Meier often speaks in interviews about how interesting choices are fundamental to a fun
game. Well, when I suggest dramatizing SE I mean convert it into "interesting choices IN
ACTION." Make the player have TO DO something that creates a +2 bonus.
In closing, SE is definitely NOT an evolution in the Civ genre. It is a lateral
development, an interesting experiment, kinda fun at best. It's that "kinda fun" that I
dread will lull the designers into complacency. But hark, ye over-worked game designers,
the one thing I would NOT like to see when I load the game off the CD that comes in the
Civilization 3 box that I find under my Christmas tree this year... is anything resembling
SMAC-style "Social Engineering."
And did I mention I'm not particulary fond of the SE thing?
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