Rich editor or stacked movement?

[jbrians]

I'm worried about the amount of attention that's lately been given to this stacked movement and proximate activation issue. It would be convinient, but I really don't think it would significantly enhance my enjoyment of the game. I would really hate to see some cool editor/scenario features get axed because they wanted to spend time on this.
-Brian

[Libertarian]

I wish we could get both, Brian. All the best in your pursuit of what you want.

By the way, from some of the coy responses in the chat, one might presume to hope that there will be significant editor enhancements. My guess: most of the time has been spent there and group-move/prox-activation proved too problematic to pursue for now.

[Barnacle Bill]

Re: Rich editor or stacked movement?

Originally posted by jbrians
I'm worried about the amount of attention that's lately been given to this stacked movement and proximate activation issue. It would be convinient, but I really don't think it would significantly enhance my enjoyment of the game. I would really hate to see some cool editor/scenario features get axed because they wanted to spend time on this.
-Brian

I have to echo this concern.

On proximate activation, I've actually been trying to produce a set of rules by which this could work and not be just as inconvenient, unless of course it reads my mind

On stacked movement, Civ3 is a sequel to Civ2, and done by the same developer (as a corporate entity) as SMAC. It is not a sequel to CTP2, and no one involved in Civ3 had any involvement in the CTP series. There is no more reason to believe that Civ3 would as a matter of course borrow any particular idea from the CTP series than from the Imperialism series or the Europa Universalis series - plenty of cool stuff there which COULD be borrowed to good effect but no justification to get upset that they did not. There was no stacked movement in Civ2, either, so it is not a matter of their having cut an existing feature out of the series. Nor, to my knowledge, did any of the pre-release info from Firaxis promise stacked movement.

The editor, though... since Civ3 IS a sequel to Civ2, and Civ2 had a very powerful editor, and Firaxis published a lot of pre-release hype essentially to the effect that the editing capabilities in Civ3 would be BETTER than Civ2, there is every reason to hold their feet to the fire on this.

[simwiz2]

"There was no stacked movement in Civ2, either, so it is not a matter of their having cut an existing feature out of the series. Nor, to my knowledge, did any of the pre-release info from Firaxis promise stacked movement."


Some things should go without saying, such as stacked movement.

its been 5 years since civ2, and another 50$, so i dont expect civ3 to be civ2, i expect it to be BETTER than civ2.

if firaxis releases MP w/o stacked movement, think how bad it will be, up to 16 players moving around MASSIVE (because MP is competetive) armies. 16 people moving 100+ units top the frontlines every turn does not make for fun gaming

[Special_Olympic]

Re: Re: Rich editor or stacked movement?

Originally posted by Barnacle Bill


There was no stacked movement in Civ2, either, so it is not a matter of their having cut an existing feature out of the series. Nor, to my knowledge, did any of the pre-release info from Firaxis promise stacked movement.

True, but in a game like this stacked movement is a must and not having it makes civ3 almost unplayable.

[Travathian]

Just think, if they had released the game when it was finished, and not when the calendar said it was time to ship, we wouldn't even be having this debate. Sad really.

[ACooper]

I don't understand that if stacked movement was not in Civ2 and it was playable why is the same situation unplayable in Civ3.

It would be a nice feature, but their are many more important items (ie Editor, Corruption, or combat)

The amount of posts on stacked movement far outway its value and the editor would be more on target with what was promised to begin with.

[Skanky Burns]

I guess we are just getting lazier

In all seriousness though, stacked movement far outweighs any other thing Firaxis could add to the game. Moving 30 to 50 units per turn is very tiresome, and could be made so much easier. The ancient period is fun because you are doing more strategising than mindless repetitive movements, whereas by the end of the game, most of your time will be spent shuffling your units around, not actually making decisions or strategy.

It would significantly enhance my enjoyment of the game (provided its implemented well).

Of course, i would like a better editor as well, so those mod-makers can have a field-day making other stuff for my enjoyment , but stacked movement is a higher priority for me.

[Barnacle Bill]

I agree that Civ3 should be better than Civ2. However, stacked movement is not the definition of "better". For a sequel, "better" could be just "runs on today's mainstream gaming OS's & has graphics at the resolution/color depth used by contemporary games". No one feature defines "better".

IMO, Civ3 is already better than Civ2 in certain ways:
1) Air units are more realistically modelled (this would be stronger if they could sink ships & be hurt by return fire from AA-capable modern units, though), instead of the same old system Sid Meier originally copied from Empire.
2) Trade is more realistrically modelled.
3) Espionage is more realistically modelled (although costs are perhaps to too high).

However, the editing capabilities are currently a serious degradation of Civ2 capabilities, so if the current patch is the last then I'd have to say the gains are outweighed by the loses. If, on the other hand, subsequent patches bring the editing capabilities up at least as good as Civ2, I will play Civ3 instead of Civ2 - the functional definition of "better".

IMO, the root of this end-game tedium is too many units, and is caused in turn by the unrealisticly low maintenance costs. In real life, it costs most of the defense budget to maintain the forces we already have, and very little is left over to expand (i.e. build new units) or modernized (i.e. upgrade existing units). In real life, the cumulative cost to maintain a unit exceeds the cost to raise a new one just like it in only a few years. In real life, the cost of units increases geometrically with technology for several reasons: each generation of weapons costs much more than the last, each generation of weapons requires more support & eats more ammo/fuel so the "tail to tooth" ratio keeps going up (i.e. a lower percentage of your total military manpower actually have the primary duty of firing weapons). The economy grows at a much slower rate than the cost of military forces, so the size of the overall force (counting only "teeth") keeps shrinking unless you keep raising the percentage of the GDP devoted to military spending (which ultimately broke the economic back of the USSR).

I personally would prefer to fix the problem not by a bandaide to make it easier to deal with too many units but by simple changes to make it more like real life:
1) Maintenance should be a percentage of the cost of the unit, not a fixed cost per unit.
2) Both the cost and effectiveness of units should increase exponentially with technology, so that even if your economy is growing (due to new buildings & terrain improvements) the total number of units you can afford goes down while the aggregate "bang" of however many units you can afford in a given generation goes up compared to the previous generation (because the effectiveness goes up at a higher rate than the cost).

Workers should very definately be included in that, which says either we need a new worker-type unit in every generation or every time technology increases worker capabilities it should increase their cost as well. Having a horde of workers represents investing in economic growth rather than military power, which is a real life trade off. Japan's post-WWII "economic miracle" was financed by defense spending below 1% of GDP while the USSR was spending 14-25% (hard to tell for sure because of their accounting system), the US was averaging around 7% and Western Europe was averaging around 4%. However, Western Europe invested their "peace dividend" in welfare state benefits rather than economic growth (in Civ terms a higher luxury rate to make the citizens happier rather than buying/maintaining more workers to grow the economy faster) while the Japanese investing in growing their economy. Thus, the Soviet economy actually shrank as their military grew, the US & Western European economies grew moderately while their militaries shrank, and the Japanese economy grew like weeds while their military was virtually ignored.

[Evil_Eric_4]

I want both

Eventually we will have both -either from firaxis or game modders themselves.
I only hope its sooner rather than later and the more we point out these problems(both of which are absolute necessities in MP) the sooner that they may be addressed.

just my two cents.

[sophist]

Originally posted by Barnacle Bill
I agree that Civ3 should be better than Civ2. However, stacked movement is not the definition of "better". For a sequel, "better" could be just "runs on today's mainstream gaming OS's & has graphics at the resolution/color depth used by contemporary games". No one feature defines "better".

No, but the minimum bar gets raised over time. That's progress. My expectations were set this way. Civ2 was clearly the best game of its time. To be considered just as good, Civ3 should have similarly blown out the competition in terms of features, fun, and replayability. There are certain minimum standards that exist today that didn't exist in civ2's time. Just because civ2 didn't meet them doesn't make it a lesser game if it met and exceeded the standards of its time. Civ3 doesn't, with group movement and the editor quality being two of those unmet standards.

I started a game for the first time in two weeks a few minutes ago. I quit after 10 minutes because I knew exactly what was going to happen and it just didn't seem like it would be fun enough to justify my time. It would just become a boring exercise in tedium. The fun part of the game runs out sometime in the cavalry period, and given the way the game slows down as you progress, the period after that would take a far greater amount of my time than anything leading up to it.

[Akka]

Originally posted by ****gyRA
I don't understand that if stacked movement was not in Civ2 and it was playable why is the same situation unplayable in Civ3.

I don't understand that if Civ1 was displayed in 320x200 with 256 colors and peopel thought it was fine, why if Civ3 came with same graphics they would think it's not ok.

I do agree though that I would prefer to get first a full editor, THEN stacked movement.

[Barnacle Bill]

Originally posted by sophist


No, but the minimum bar gets raised over time. That's progress. My expectations were set this way. Civ2 was clearly the best game of its time. To be considered just as good, Civ3 should have similarly blown out the competition in terms of features, fun, and replayability. There are certain minimum standards that exist today that didn't exist in civ2's time. Just because civ2 didn't meet them doesn't make it a lesser game if it met and exceeded the standards of its time. Civ3 doesn't, with group movement and the editor quality being two of those unmet standards.

By this logic, then, here are a few more "unmet standards":

Civ3 doesn't model strategic resources and their relationship to production or colonization of less-developed civilizations as realistically as in the Imperialsm series.

Civ3 doesn't model diplomacy or colonization of "uncivilized" areas (with or without existing "native" populations) or the impact of religion (on both internal stability and international affairs) as realistically as in the Europa Universalis series.

Civ3 doesn't model combat in any given era as realistically as just about any turn-based strategic/operation-level wargame ever published which is set in that same era.

Those are all, IMO, much much bigger deals than stacked movement. I don't consider Civ3 to be a huge disappointment or no fun or whatever for their lack, though.