Disenchanted

[Velociryx]

Lib, nato, PM to both of ya....

-=Vel=-
(you may have already seen it, but if you're like me, I always forget that thing's there....)

[Heliodorus]

Atlas Shrugged? Recommended reading for me?
Only thing I know about it is that it was the first book that Officer Barbrady read after he learned to read, and then he promptly gave up reading (South Park).

Static vs. Dynamic:
I once interviewed for a stock-room job at a manufacturing plant - the kind of thing where you have to manage the Just-In-Time inventory system. The interviewer got me onto my hobbies toward the end of the interview, and I talked about my love of board games. He asked me if I played chess. I said no, that I didn't like chess because it was a closed system; I preferred dice games because there was a dynamism created by the random element. I didn't get the job, naturally, because elitists love chess for some reason. Bah. The fact that a computer can beat a human being at chess is evidence of the limitations of the game, not the greatness of computer thinking.

Point being, redundantly I admit, that we'll always be able to pin the computer down with its "thinking" style in a dynamic game. that was true in Civ 2 and other games. Analyst's brilliant deconstruction of how the Civ3 AI manages reveals how the design of Civ3 was manipulated, and that manipulation induced boredom.

But something seems to be missing in all of this, which stems from my question: Why was Civ2 so much fun even if the AI was so "weak". The element of it that was joyous was always the storyline of a Civ game.

There are a lot of criticisms of Civ3 features and whatnot. But from the point of view of improving the game, I strongly believe that the critical element to work toward is the fostering of the mystical element in the players' minds. Why is the storyline of a particular game dying out? How can we improve the game to breathe new life into the storyline?

Adding elements to the late game that create strategy decisions. Adding elements that make the computer competent at warfare throughout the ages. Adding elements that make warfare fun during all ages for humans to wage. Reducing interface tedium, of course.

It's still possible to fix Civ3 to make it as fun and dynamic as Civ2, I think. If nothing else, I'm enthused about the idea of trying
It'll be fun!

Hey, Yin, what do we have to lose, eh? I mean, the disasters of tweaks should at least provide some great laughs, don't you think? Reminds me of the time we hit the old civ cheat thingie and made all of our triremes "flying"

[Zoid]

Originally posted by korn469
Unfortunantly when comparing the scope and variety of intellectual challenges, SMAC beats Civ3. From designing your army, to creating an utopian existance for your subjects SMAC presented the player with many options that don't involve building or warmongering directly. SMAC has better, deeper, and more interesting diplomacy on every level except for the trade screen where Civ3 soundly beats it, but that one victory is a hollow one because SMAC raised the bar for diplomacy and Civ3 only halfway delivered on it. Civ3 removed all of the nuance from diplomacy and basically made boil down to "i have this item, what will you give me for it?" then its over. Diplomacy in SMAC had more nuance, and should have been a stepping stone, and not a high water mark. Then their is unit design, Social Engineering, Atrocities, the Planetary Council, Economic Victory, etc. Civ3 lost alot of SMAC's scope and it suffers for it gameplay wise, because players have to focus entirely on parts of the game which have been dumbed down to give the AI a fighting chance. Then to top off that, it seems like firaxis forgot to add the buildings for the industrial and modern eras. There are far too few buildings in those era, and the player quickly runs out of everything to build.

My sentiments exactly, and even if the AI was embarrassingly easy to defeat in SMAC (even for me, not being a very good strategist really) I had tremendous fun and never once felt bored by the game.

[Libertarian]

Vel, got it. Thanks.

[Zoid]

If you're interested, here's a thread at Straight Dope, where I wrote a parody of Randian love scenes.

That one was priceless, Libertarian. I tried to read AS way back in ther early nineties, but I got so annoyed I actually threw the book in the fireplace and watched it burn Farenheit 451, someone?

And Velociryx I would like to concur with what Libertarian says, You´re truly an amazing guy

So´s Analyst whom I vaugely remember from my skulking in the fringes of the Firaxis SMAC forum

[Analyst Redux]

Atlas Shrugged—there’s a blast from the past. Ayn Rand is a phase who advertises herself as an endpoint. Her message is seductive to those of us who regard ourselves as intellectual elites since, as Rand herself emphasized, it is not a philosophy for the masses, but a philosophy of the elites, by the elites and for the elites. But it is definitely wiser to balance her ideals against more practical realities.

A world of self-selected elites will not create the utopia Rand depicts in Gault’s Gulch (which she conveniently stocks with rich soil, abundant minerals and the descendents of wealthy families), they will create Enron. You can’t have both “freedom from coercion” and “freedom from fraud”. George Will, of all people, makes that point in his most recent column. Functional free markets require transparency, in order for investors to make informed choices. Absent “coercion” (i.e. effective government oversight and regulation), there is no transparency, and absent transparency, the intellectual elites that Rand has so much faith in (by assuming that intellectual superiority and moral superiority are the same thing—a seductive idea for intelligent, but unworldly, young people), these elites will not give you an investor’s utopia; they will give you Enron. Will argues, quite interestingly, that loyal Republicans who believe in unrestricted free markets have the greatest interest in strict regulation of those markets.

So as not to utterly derail this thread, I can make this relate to our exercise here. What this thread, and other similar attempts by the consumers here to communicate with the producers, is an attempt by the non-producers—the people Rand would have considered the system's parasites (not to put too fine a spin on it)--to coerce the producers. We are demanding transparency. We are demanding input into a production process when we have not contributed either capitol, labor or risk. In Rand’s world, if you like a product, you buy it. If you don’t, you get out there and make a better one. If you can’t/won’t do that, you don’t count, because your contribution to society is non-existent. The people who try to squelch commentary on this board by variations of the argument “if you think you can program a better game, do it, otherwise, shut the hell up!” are, in their own way, perfect disciples of Rand.

Rand’s philosophy has never been any way to run a railroad (forgive me, I couldn’t resist the pun), but in the economic model of America in the dawn of the 21st century, when 2/3 of our economic activity is produced by consumer spending, it is most especially out of place. Our message board, with its insistence that a producer of a product must be responsive to that product’s consumers if it wishes to survive, is an accurate reflection of our broader demand-driven economy. It is the diametric opposite of Rand’s producer-driven utopia. Even in the midst of a recession, it’s hard for me to look around myself and lend much credence to Rand’s vision that, in the event the consumers gained the upper hand over the producers, the economic world would all go to hell in a handbasket.

So press on people. Leave Rand behind in the dustbin of historically interesting, but practically misguided, philosophers where she belongs. Continue to demand, demand, demand. Demand Firaxis' accountability and transparency to the ultimate bestowers of its capital—the purchasers of its products--because that is how the real economy works today. Rand will spin in her grave, but that’s ok. She was wrong.

[Heliodorus]

For some reason I always mentally equate as synonyms Ann Rand and Anne Rice. I wonder why that is?

But to keep this on thread, I never mentally distinguished between Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds.

[Libertarian]

Well, let's get at least one thing clear, George Will's musings notwithstanding. Noncoercion is merely a derived premise of Objectivism, and is not the axiomatic foundation that it is of libertarianism. In fact, Rand openly despised libertarians, deriding us as "Hippies of the Right".

Moreover, having seen Will squirm in a discussion of Austrian Economics with an evasiveness rivaling that of a greased cat, I'm convinced that he never read Human Action. The Cliff notes, maybe, but that's about it.

Yes, this is topical. What we are doing with our complaints is not coercion, coercion being defined libertarianly as the initiation of force or fraud. Our force is a response to what we perceive as a fraud that was initiated upon us. At least, that's how I see it.

[Libertarian]

[pssst... Helio... Just for the record, it's Ayn... Rhymes with "mine"...]

[Cunctator]

The best thread i red on apolyton.

Analyst Redux, your analisys on the game AI beeing "better" is perfect. It clearly shows how rules and AI performance are strictly connected. Indeed i think that the "late game tedium", so well expressed by Velociryx in his first post, is not caused by the design decision that you pointed out in the list. While I agee on all your 10 points, speaking about how they "enhance" AI, only few of them detract from the game, terrain enhancement and ZOC comes to mind; some, like air missions, are OK (sadly the AI don't use "supporting units" properly), others are an acceptable tradeoff. What makes the late game boring, to me at least, is:

1) Lack of choices, besides warmongering or micromanaging tiles, from industrial era onwoard.
2) The absence of a "dipomatic level"; UN is HIMO the worst aspect of the game (AI related concerns or game rushed?).
3) A lousy modern era: no need to say more, a lot of advices on the forum about this.

What i mean is that cut down things that the game doesn't handle correctly or that can be easly abused is HIMO a good choice, because these ultimately lead to imbalances. Surely Firaxis went to far away along this line, throwing away the baby with the dirty water, so to speak.

Just a few words on the terrain enhancement matter, because this really detract one of the funniest part of the game: planning city founding. Vel, may be you will consider this aspect in your promising mod.

In Civ III you can put a city everywhere, no matter desert, tundra, jungle, lack of resources: if it's not to far away from you capital it will develope in a big thriveing city. There's no strategy involved in placing cities (look at how efficient the AI is ), and as a secondary effect a surplus production that makes easyer to build everyting in your core cities and tons of units, worsening the well known late game tedium. This is due to the fact that you can maximize shield or food prodution on every tile at the advent of railroad (a lot earlier than Civ II, by the way), choosing the desired ratio between food and shields.

A viable workaround could be differentiate terrain tiles, lowering total shield production and makeing them food or shield specific, ala Civ II. Now i'am playing with a modified bic so that:
- no mines on plains and grassland
- no base shield and no irrigation on desert
- no base food on sea
- only 1 shield when mining mountain
- three times the effort to cut jungle

This way i have:
Flood plains: first rate food tile; total max production: 5
Grassland: second rate food tile; total max production: 5 (no shield)
Plains: half way tile; total max production: 4 (1 shield)
Hill: first rate shield tile: total max production: 5
Mountain: second rate shield tile: total max production: 3
Forest: half way tile, viable as shield producer in grassland; total max production: 3
Jungle: lousy terrain, hard to develop: total max production: 1
Desert: lousy terrain; total max production: 2
Tundra: lousy terrain; total max production: 3

That said, any effort in enhancing the game will lead to a less competent AI, as Analyst Redux clearly pointed out.

[DilithiumDad]

Analyst, your post makes a lot of sense. In comparison to SMAC, they eliminated things the AI did not do well and made the stupid things the AI did become smarter.

In making suggestions for a patch or expansion, we need to look at how ell the AI is going to implement them. Simple things like adding more buildings and units will be taken up by the AI easily. Special rules that apply only to the AI are another way to keep them competitive, the best example is widely supported idea of freee automatic unit upgrades for the AI.

[Analyst Redux]

I should probably address a few comments to the late game tedium issue. I am in basic agreement with virtually all of the complaints and observations about late game tedium. My own pet peve is pollution. That Civ III actually *increases* the probability of late game pollution, makes it physically impossible to rid your cities of producing pollution and provides inadequate tools for dealing with automating pollution cleanup...the whole pollution package makes me want to grab a Firaxis programer by the collar and just start smacking: "WHAT...*smack!*...ABOUT...*smack!*...CLEANING...*s mack!*...POLLUTION...*smack!*...DO...*smack!*...YO U...*smack!*...THINK...*smack!*...IS...*smack!*... FUUUUUN!?!?!?*smacksmacksmack!*

Whew. Glad to get that out of my system

Endgame tedium, however, has always been the bane of this series. As others have noted, it was less noticeable in SMAC because there were so many more possibilities for verticle development, you didn't run out of things to do, and there were more distracting window dressings/bells and whistles (the plot breaks, the voiceovers, the SP movies, etc.) that gave you a break from unit management. But while the lack of window dressing was, in all liklihood, an economic necessity this time around, the lack of verticle development is, I believe, a deliberate design decision, consistent with my thesis.

Verticle development is on that long list of things the AI seemingly could not be taught to do. One of the great things about Civ II and SMAC was the possibility of super cities: manipulating tile improvement, terraforming, food trade, etc. to create monstrous cities that, if you stuffed them with wonders, could become mega-producers worth 5-10 other cities. If you are going to change the system to produce crippling disadvantages to building out (as this one does), you'd think that then, you'd reward building up. Obviously, this one doesn't, and IMO, it's one of those deliberate decisions designed to level the playing field for the AI, which never built a super-city in its life and couldn't be taught to. So you reach a point in the game where crippling corruption rates prevent further expansion, a lack of tools prevent further verticle development, and the culture rules make further conquest rather pointless (because you must either raze cities or watch them revert).

In short, you quite rapidly reach a point where you can't build or expand and it's pointless to conquer. So the second half of the "4x" game becomes a "1x" game. All you do is hold in place and maximize research until the tech tree yields the UN or a space ship. Yes, that is, indeed, quite tedious. And, Cunctator, I'm afraid that it is also inherent in the stripped-down, AI friendly, rules design.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Analyst Redux
That Civ III actually *increases* the probability of late game pollution, makes it physically impossible to rid your cities of producing pollution and provides inadequate tools for dealing with automating pollution cleanup...the whole pollution package makes me want to grab a Firaxis programer by the collar and just start smacking: "WHAT...*smack!*...ABOUT...*smack!*...CLEANING...*s mack!*...POLLUTION...*smack!*...DO...*smack!*...YO U...*smack!*...THINK...*smack!*...IS...*smack!*... FUUUUUN!?!?!?*smacksmacksmack!*
.

While I'm not nearly as frustrated with the game as many of the posters in this thread, I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read this - I could not have said it better. It happens to be my pet peeve as well.

-Arrian

[Heliodorus]

Analyst, two questions:

When you say "can't be taught to," are you being generous to the design team in that they actually chose not to pursue such teaching?

Is it fair to say that the basic source of AI behavior for Civ3 was a previous Civ version's AI?

I guess I'm a little more disappointed in what Firaxis has released here, if the answers to either question is yes.

[Cunctator]

the lack of verticle development is, I believe, a deliberate design decision, consistent with my thesis

Absolutely agree.
I don't think they forgot to put something to build/do in the end game