Tweet
Greetings Civ Community. I would first like to apologize for the extreme tardiness of this write. Real life just kicked me over the last couple of months, and I have not been able to give this any real attention. Hopefully the Interview I did with Dennis Shirk on PolyCast provided adequate distraction.
The first thing I need to inform you about is that the Demonstration we witnessed at PAX was/is a Pre-Alpha build. What does that mean for us? Well it means that nothing we saw or heard about is absolutely final. I personally find this a bit odd, if they plan on releasing the game this fall/winter. I guess it really all depends on just how close they are to a Beta version. But one thing was certain that weekend, they are proud of the game, and while they have somehow managed to keep its development so completely under wraps, they still have a lot more to tell us over the next several months.
The Demo itself has conducted by Dennis Shirk and Pete Murray, and the game play screens looked like the screen shots they released with the initial press releases and what not. The actual map itself/game play screen doesn’t look like it will change too much in my opinion, but the UI itself could very well change. The UI took some lessons from Civ Revolutions, in an effort to streamline the interface, but more on that later.
Visually, the game looks really nice, nothing dramatically different from the previous incarnations of Civ, with the exception of the Hex Tiles. Firaxis did mention that they would be introducing different tile sets for different regions/parts of the world such as Asia, Europe, America and Africa. I think that this is a great idea and can clue the player in that you are truly entering a different part of the globe, even on Random maps.
Why Hexes?
In addition to the fact that parts of the CIV Community have been asking for hex based maps for 20 years, Hexes will actually help create real sea channels, and will help with route pathing over long distance. In regards to sea channels, gone will be the days when you will have 2land tiles diagonally next to each other and surrounded by water, and you can move land units to the other land tile and sea units from one sea tile to the other. See this poor example, X = land and O = water:
OOXOO
OXOOO
UI Changes and the Like:
Dennis and Peter also mentioned that Firaxis was looking for ways to continue to improve and streamline the UI experience. One thing that has longed bothered the team, has been that the game play is constantly interrupted by all kinds of pop ups messages. They have incorporated some of the lessons thy learned while designing CIV Revolutions by streamlining and minimizing the foot print of the UI on the Game Screen. They did this by doing two key things:
1) By moving the game notifications for things like Technology that has just been researched, City Build Production Messages/Queues icons on the side of the screen, where you can address them, without losing any benefits if you put off on dealing with them that same turn, when you are ready to do so. There are few things more annoying than trying to move your units around or deal with a problem, when you are taking away from your current task/objective to deal with the Tech Queue or Build orders. Now you can address these types of things at your convenience by clicking on the icon, which will take you to scene of the action so to speak, so you can see what is happening in the general area.
2) The UI is now layered. You simply click on or mouse over one of a lot fewer UI icons and the appropriate sub-layer of commands, orders and options is displayed. Less Clutter with a larger view of the game world.
Modding:
CIV 5’s modding tools will be even more powerful previous iterations of the Franchise, thanks to a new language, LUA (spelling). Lua is the primary scripting language and totally exposes the User Interface.
Mods can and will be uploaded to Firaxis for Storage, where players can browse them right from the game itself. But have no fear, The Civilization Community’s fan site are in no in danger, as modders can link directly to their Mod’s thread on CFC, Aployton and We Play Civ, etc… so that the community can comment on them and make suggestions and provide feedback to the modders.
Diplomacy & City States and the AI
Some older traditional Civilizations will receive new leaders instead of their more traditional Civilization Leader choices.
Each AI will have unique strategies for a preferred victory condition, but are smart enough to recognize whether or not that Victory Condition is feasible and to switch strategies for a different victory condition. The goal here is to make it feel like you really are playing with a friend and not the computer.
There is now a full time programmer solely dedicated to the AI which will have different levels and provide feedback.
Each Civilization will speak it native language on the Diplomacy screen, with subtitled translations of course. You will also be able to the Leader’s entire body, instead of just their upper torso and face.
A New Diplomacy Option was introduced – Research Agreement.
Two civilizations can now agree via the Diplomacy system to help research a Technology. Each Civ would front some money, and gain a bonus to Research that Technology. If these two Civilizations go to war before the desired Technology is researched, each Civilization is out the money they fronted and thy both loose the bonus to research. War cancels any peace time agreements and trade between Civilizations.
City States – this sounds like a huge change to me, and very exciting for the Civilization franchise.
City States are just that, NPC/AI Civilizations that will never expand past 1 city. They will also never win. Their sole purpose in the game is to really drive the interactions and relationships between the major civilizations. The example they used during the DEMO was the Maritime City of Venice. Venice was plagued by Barbarians, and they might ask you to help them fend off the barbarian hordes. You could gift them gold, units and even go to war against the barbarian horde. IF you opt to help them they could gift you with food, or even military units, or even gold. The point is, if you help them they will help you. If you scorn them, it could potentially come back around to bite you. In the games that they have played, the Firaxis team has had 3 Major Civilizations going to war with the player over 1 City State.
Culture:
Civilization Borders will grow 1 tile toward useful resources, and you can buy land to expand your borders.
COMBAT:
1 Unit per tile (sort of) and yes this includes an Allied civilization’s units.
You can now only have 1 military, 1 Civilian and 1 Air Unit per tile. Each unit in the game will be designated to one of these three different layers. If Unit A wants to occupy Unit B’s Hex, you can either move unit B out of the way or they can swap places. This last option is especially useful for protecting damaged units from being killed.
Ranged Combat - As seen in the initial screen shots, Ranged units can now actually engage enemy units that are not adjacent to them, in both an Offensive and Defensive capacity. Unfortunately, this is a bit abstracted when it comes to the actual physical distance that each Hex would represent, so you could actually have an Archer shooting arrows across the English Channel from England into France. Thankfully game play trumps reality here. They did mention that it would be a good idea to protect not only your civilian units, but also your ranged units from direct enemy assault.
As mentioned in during the audio interview with Dennis Shirk, Units are designed to persist longer in terms of actual combat and game time.
Terrain now plays a much more important role in attacking and defending so choose your unit’s positions carefully. Based upon what actually shown in the Demo, it is hard to really go into this any further, but it seems like a good idea to try and funnel your enemy’s troops through a canyon to rain arrows down upon them and to flank them in the pass.
Victory Condition Changes:
They mentioned that the Conquest Victory has been modified from its previous incarnations of having to literally capture or destroy every enemy city, to now simply having to capture all enemy Civilizations’ capital. This was done to help prevent the scenario where you had to find that one last enemy city that is built in the middle of nowhere on a 1 tile section of frozen tundra that the AI decided to spam there.
Again my sinceret appologies for the prolonged delay.
The first thing I need to inform you about is that the Demonstration we witnessed at PAX was/is a Pre-Alpha build. What does that mean for us? Well it means that nothing we saw or heard about is absolutely final. I personally find this a bit odd, if they plan on releasing the game this fall/winter. I guess it really all depends on just how close they are to a Beta version. But one thing was certain that weekend, they are proud of the game, and while they have somehow managed to keep its development so completely under wraps, they still have a lot more to tell us over the next several months.
The Demo itself has conducted by Dennis Shirk and Pete Murray, and the game play screens looked like the screen shots they released with the initial press releases and what not. The actual map itself/game play screen doesn’t look like it will change too much in my opinion, but the UI itself could very well change. The UI took some lessons from Civ Revolutions, in an effort to streamline the interface, but more on that later.
Visually, the game looks really nice, nothing dramatically different from the previous incarnations of Civ, with the exception of the Hex Tiles. Firaxis did mention that they would be introducing different tile sets for different regions/parts of the world such as Asia, Europe, America and Africa. I think that this is a great idea and can clue the player in that you are truly entering a different part of the globe, even on Random maps.
Why Hexes?
In addition to the fact that parts of the CIV Community have been asking for hex based maps for 20 years, Hexes will actually help create real sea channels, and will help with route pathing over long distance. In regards to sea channels, gone will be the days when you will have 2land tiles diagonally next to each other and surrounded by water, and you can move land units to the other land tile and sea units from one sea tile to the other. See this poor example, X = land and O = water:
OOXOO
OXOOO
UI Changes and the Like:
Dennis and Peter also mentioned that Firaxis was looking for ways to continue to improve and streamline the UI experience. One thing that has longed bothered the team, has been that the game play is constantly interrupted by all kinds of pop ups messages. They have incorporated some of the lessons thy learned while designing CIV Revolutions by streamlining and minimizing the foot print of the UI on the Game Screen. They did this by doing two key things:
1) By moving the game notifications for things like Technology that has just been researched, City Build Production Messages/Queues icons on the side of the screen, where you can address them, without losing any benefits if you put off on dealing with them that same turn, when you are ready to do so. There are few things more annoying than trying to move your units around or deal with a problem, when you are taking away from your current task/objective to deal with the Tech Queue or Build orders. Now you can address these types of things at your convenience by clicking on the icon, which will take you to scene of the action so to speak, so you can see what is happening in the general area.
2) The UI is now layered. You simply click on or mouse over one of a lot fewer UI icons and the appropriate sub-layer of commands, orders and options is displayed. Less Clutter with a larger view of the game world.
Modding:
CIV 5’s modding tools will be even more powerful previous iterations of the Franchise, thanks to a new language, LUA (spelling). Lua is the primary scripting language and totally exposes the User Interface.
Mods can and will be uploaded to Firaxis for Storage, where players can browse them right from the game itself. But have no fear, The Civilization Community’s fan site are in no in danger, as modders can link directly to their Mod’s thread on CFC, Aployton and We Play Civ, etc… so that the community can comment on them and make suggestions and provide feedback to the modders.
Diplomacy & City States and the AI
Some older traditional Civilizations will receive new leaders instead of their more traditional Civilization Leader choices.
Each AI will have unique strategies for a preferred victory condition, but are smart enough to recognize whether or not that Victory Condition is feasible and to switch strategies for a different victory condition. The goal here is to make it feel like you really are playing with a friend and not the computer.
There is now a full time programmer solely dedicated to the AI which will have different levels and provide feedback.
Each Civilization will speak it native language on the Diplomacy screen, with subtitled translations of course. You will also be able to the Leader’s entire body, instead of just their upper torso and face.
A New Diplomacy Option was introduced – Research Agreement.
Two civilizations can now agree via the Diplomacy system to help research a Technology. Each Civ would front some money, and gain a bonus to Research that Technology. If these two Civilizations go to war before the desired Technology is researched, each Civilization is out the money they fronted and thy both loose the bonus to research. War cancels any peace time agreements and trade between Civilizations.
City States – this sounds like a huge change to me, and very exciting for the Civilization franchise.
City States are just that, NPC/AI Civilizations that will never expand past 1 city. They will also never win. Their sole purpose in the game is to really drive the interactions and relationships between the major civilizations. The example they used during the DEMO was the Maritime City of Venice. Venice was plagued by Barbarians, and they might ask you to help them fend off the barbarian hordes. You could gift them gold, units and even go to war against the barbarian horde. IF you opt to help them they could gift you with food, or even military units, or even gold. The point is, if you help them they will help you. If you scorn them, it could potentially come back around to bite you. In the games that they have played, the Firaxis team has had 3 Major Civilizations going to war with the player over 1 City State.
Culture:
Civilization Borders will grow 1 tile toward useful resources, and you can buy land to expand your borders.
COMBAT:
1 Unit per tile (sort of) and yes this includes an Allied civilization’s units.
You can now only have 1 military, 1 Civilian and 1 Air Unit per tile. Each unit in the game will be designated to one of these three different layers. If Unit A wants to occupy Unit B’s Hex, you can either move unit B out of the way or they can swap places. This last option is especially useful for protecting damaged units from being killed.
Ranged Combat - As seen in the initial screen shots, Ranged units can now actually engage enemy units that are not adjacent to them, in both an Offensive and Defensive capacity. Unfortunately, this is a bit abstracted when it comes to the actual physical distance that each Hex would represent, so you could actually have an Archer shooting arrows across the English Channel from England into France. Thankfully game play trumps reality here. They did mention that it would be a good idea to protect not only your civilian units, but also your ranged units from direct enemy assault.
As mentioned in during the audio interview with Dennis Shirk, Units are designed to persist longer in terms of actual combat and game time.
Terrain now plays a much more important role in attacking and defending so choose your unit’s positions carefully. Based upon what actually shown in the Demo, it is hard to really go into this any further, but it seems like a good idea to try and funnel your enemy’s troops through a canyon to rain arrows down upon them and to flank them in the pass.
Victory Condition Changes:
They mentioned that the Conquest Victory has been modified from its previous incarnations of having to literally capture or destroy every enemy city, to now simply having to capture all enemy Civilizations’ capital. This was done to help prevent the scenario where you had to find that one last enemy city that is built in the middle of nowhere on a 1 tile section of frozen tundra that the AI decided to spam there.
Again my sinceret appologies for the prolonged delay.
... hope it turns out OK though... as the concepts are not exactly easy to visualise... less units, so I guess conquering resources will be the main goal in order to build more, if the number of units is small, and you have to utilize them right, losing a single unit may be deterimental to game success (ie Panzer General), instead of building up the whole empire the focus may shift to tactical instead of strategic etc...
Comment