META: Civ Game Concepts And Discussion Of Civ Mechanisms

[GePap]

talk about coming back from the dead here.

[MORON]

What is fun to me is control and choice. Choice as in mutiple approaches and solution to every problem. If I have to REX/ICS in every game, it is not fun. If I have to tech to monarch 1st every game, it is not that fun. Not only that the choices must be open, but that problems should be different each game, though Civ provides that already.

History is nice, but I don't plays games for it. I have no interest in playing two turns and die of old age. History is the background, not the goal and shouldn't remotely be the goal. To me, history lies within the game rather than outside it. History is when the zulus invaded my pop 2 city at 1420BC and my revenge war declared at 1380BC. I don't care about character heads, but I do care about my horseman that started exploring at 3800BC, fought in 6 wars and two dozen battles and saving my capital from certain capture. That, to me, is history.

As for simulation, it should present the feel rather than the reality of the sistuation. It should follow an player's intutition and allow interesting choice to be made, but nothing more.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GePap
talk about coming back from the dead here.

Yup, i saw the title and read the first couple of posts, and was about to post a link to my column, when i saw that id already done that almost a year ago.

At least this means everyones had a year to read the column

[Brent]

I do want the option to create your own civ as part of startup, in addition to being able to use one you've previously designed or one that came with the game. We need prestatted real world civs. Maybe allow antitraits to be inputted by the player but not preprogrammed into real civs? I'd like variety in the way traits work: some can be a continuum, peaceful to militaristic, 10 steps. Some can be on or off. Some can be 1 to 10 starting at neutral. I do want to be able to adjust individual aspects of difficulty independantly, including random events and goodie huts. I like ICS, but it shouldn't be necessary.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Jamski
The perfect future-Civ game for me would have to build on all the good points of the other Civ games, and pass over their weaknesses. Many people complained that Civ3 was a step back from SMAC, for example.

1) it wasn't a sequel to SMAC in the first place

2) it wasn't a step back anyway - UW was a horrible, sucky system that they got away with because they could name things "chaos gun" ( ) - it had no believability, something that is nearly essential in a civ game. SE also only worked because they didn't have to make it look like it could possibly happen. And the AI was horrible.