We are doomed. We want a more complicated game, but the casual gamer doesn't

[Grumbold]

Civ can only really make room for more complexity (or diversity) if it adopts ideas to reduce tedious repetition. To do this it has to make some broad changes -

Replace hundreds of independent units with proper armies, navies and air forces that move and attack as cohesive entities.

Replace individual tile-by-tile changes in the terrain (excluding arterial transport links) with an overall budget devoted to increasing agricultural or industrial production.

Replace individual city management with regional or total economy management. Instead of building 50 things in 50 cities simultaneously you should be focussing on which four or five things can the economy produce this year.

That would leave a lot more time to devote to thinking about other details.

[Steve Clark]

Farley, your ideas about customization are called "scenarios". Once they complete the editor, including some sort of an events file, then those things can be accomplished, as they have been in Civ2 FW (expansion pack #2) and Civ2 MGE (expansion pack #3). Now you know why I have been waiting here patiently for what I believe to be the true nature of civing, not the purposeful (is that a word?) generic nature of the regular game.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Steve Clark
Farley, your ideas about customization are called "scenarios". Once they complete the editor, including some sort of an events file, then those things can be accomplished, as they have been in Civ2 FW (expansion pack #2) and Civ2 MGE (expansion pack #3). Now you know why I have been waiting here patiently for what I believe to be the true nature of civing, not the purposeful (is that a word?) generic nature of the regular game.

Well there's still lots of things you can do now that will give you some practise for later on. At least Gramphos was able to come up with his utility, and I understand there's an animation utility available now. About the only thing that's missing really is some events triggers.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Grumbold
Civ can only really make room for more complexity (or diversity) if it adopts ideas to reduce tedious repetition. To do this it has to make some broad changes -

Hi Grumbold, agree completely with most of your points, there's just one exception.

Replace individual city management with regional or total economy management. Instead of building 50 things in 50 cities simultaneously you should be focussing on which four or five things can the economy produce this year.

While I think civ-wide economic management is the best overall goal, one can easily make a system where that is the default, but where players can drill down to the city level for particularly important cities like the capital. I Clash we do it with a hierarchy of economic orders with civ econ orders on top, then provincial ones (similar to cities in civ) and then even individual squares. It allows More micromanagement that Civ3 but does not Require it. If you are interested in seeing the system you can see it in action in Clash demo 6. Its not nuanced yet, but there's enough there for you to see how it works.

-Mark

[Comrade Tribune]

Grumbold, apart from visiting Clash -a game I very much look forward to-, please also visit the Disenchantment thread, if you didn´t, yet. I am discussing a civ-similar project there that, while being very complex on the Macro-level, will totally abolish Micromanagement -with the only exception of Battles, because this is some Micromanagement most players will probably like.

[CharlesUFarley]

OneInTen

You can't tell me your serious? You obviously didn't understand my point so let me explain it again read on...


Charles.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by OneInTen
It's my observation as a software developer that spending more than about 8 hours a day on writing software is counterproductive. If your team is doing all nighters to try to get something done it's really time to step back and ask why they're working such long hours, rather than jsut trying to work harder and harder without finding the real problem.

If you read more carefully what it is that I posted it's metaphoricly speaking. "Spending long hours at the office" just means put more time and effort into the job hence attempting to perfect a product to meet consumer needs and demands. It doesn't mean work yourself into a delusional mind melting state so that you **** up the product in question.

IT is supposed to be about knowledge, and as such it makes much more sense to work smarter, not harder.

Exactly.

Finally, I find it pretty offensive that you suggest Firaxis (and with the insinuation about programmers in general) should be working longer for no extra pay. The Firaxis employees are humans too, who have lives, families, interests, etc. They're not robots who just sit there all day for you. Just because you don't feel 100% satisfied with the game does not mean that they're lazy bastards who need to be whipped into working harder.

First, I never said anything about "working without pay" and I never ever called anyone a "lazy bastard". So don't try and mimic whatever intelligence you think you have by putting words into my mouth and then plagiarizing a fanboy argument that died off months ago. Second, (get this through your head now) all I said was that they should have put better effort into the game, and spent a little more time on it rather than releasing it so early. If they made a better Civ-Sequal than what we have now, I would've definately paid the extra $20 for it, and the poor wittle game devewopers could've gotten their money! And I know two things, one; there are no limits to how a game can be designed - programming language is a pretty powerful thing, depending on the platform and the language in question. And two; a game product is only as good as it's team of developers, in other words the more effort, detail and imagination they put into a game, the better it will turn out, and chances are sales will do very well. And in my opinion Civ3 not only lacks a decent scenario design tool, but it was released poorly tested and full of bugs. And alot of the things that made Civ2 great were raped from it entirely. So again in my opinion they didn't design Civ3 with complete dedication and effort. Did you get all that, or will I be repeating it for you in your rebuttle?

Charles.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by Steve Clark
Farley, your ideas about customization are called "scenarios". Once they complete the editor, including some sort of an events file, then those things can be accomplished, as they have been in Civ2 FW (expansion pack #2) and Civ2 MGE (expansion pack #3). Now you know why I have been waiting here patiently for what I believe to be the true nature of civing, not the purposeful (is that a word?) generic nature of the regular game.

Obviously. But all of that bibble babble that you boast about was a goal long set for the past 4 years and now with the arrival of Civ3 none of those things were emphasized on or even used. I begin to wonder is it standard policy for a game company to release their game then admit it's not finished and hurl a storm of patches at us to cover up their mistakes? Now they wanna glory us with an expansion (which I will buy if it's everything I want it to be) that could very well be nothing more than a few extra measily civs and leaders! I'll wait to see what they do, but I won't count my chickens before they hatch, which obviously most of you are.

Charles.

[Willem]

Originally posted by CharlesUFarley


Second, (get this through your head now) all I said was that they should have put better effort into the game, and spent a little more time on it rather than releasing it so early.

They may not have had a choice. If Infrogrames says ship, they have to ship. Judging from what I've been reading regarding the German translation fiasco, they don't really care about anything other than the bottom line. Don't automatically lay the blame at Firaxis's feet.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by Willem


Well there's still lots of things you can do now that will give you some practise for later on. At least Gramphos was able to come up with his utility, and I understand there's an animation utility available now. About the only thing that's missing really is some events triggers.

Sure, but ask yourself a question should a major reputable game title or company for that matter require improvement from the community through a non-profit means? I personally think it's pretty rediculous for any proffesional game company to release a game that is supposed to uphold a standard, than apon realizing that the standard was dropped, and then out of the frustration everyone with programming knowledge comes rushing in and starts designing mod-kits to fix the various flaws that they left for us. I mean don't get me wrong, without those mods and their authors we wouldn't even bother with Civ3 again. My thanks goes out to them, but Firaxis should have provided those things in the first place.

Charles.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by Willem


They may not have had a choice. If Infrogrames says ship, they have to ship. Judging from what I've been reading regarding the German translation fiasco, they don't really care about anything other than the bottom line. Don't automatically lay the blame at Firaxis's feet.

Exactly, another point I was making somewhere else was that Infogrames delt a cruddy contract with a ruin the game policy and the only thing I blame Firaxis for is signing the contract. This game has been around for over a decade and should be treated with alot more respect and devotion. And obviously we all wouldn't be in here arguing if it was, we would be playing the damn game. But you make a valid point willem, thanks.

Charles.

[CharlesUFarley]

Originally posted by OneInTen
And now in all seriousness (I can't stand when people think they're smarty pants because they know a Latin phrase or two - I had to demonstrate how that phrase reads to the average person, even one armed with a dictionary) no, I'm not trying to appeal to pity, I'm merely saying I think it's unreasonable to expect game developers to work 16 hours a day "for the love of the industry" or whatever other reason you might think for it.

Again, putting words into everyone's mouths. No one is saying that, but we do want them to work hard and we will gladly pay more if the product provides more!

I think it is instead time for us gamers to realise that the gaming industry has reached a point where it is such an expense to produce a "state of the art" title that one of two things happens - either a) Games start costing more, or b) (more likely) Onoly games with widespread mainstream appeal are released.

Exactly, so we pay more so what! What are you saying, Civ3 wasn't produced with enough resources and thats why it turned out the way it did? If so I can live with that, in fact thats what I've been saying all along.

Game companies already work (in general) on pretty thin budgets and with (comparitive to business application programmers) underpaid staff. You're not going to get them to work even longer hours, especially since if you read the stories of many games companies, they already spend most of their waking hours in the office when it gets close to crunch time.

Blah blah blah.. sure we can sit here and make excuses for not doing our jobs or producing a sh_tty product, but when it all boils down to it, your breathing, your alive and you have one chance in life to do it right so you either try your best or you don't try at all, and if thats Firaxis' best than I'm already bored! Instead we have this "one foot in the grave, I'm a tired old programmer with a family at home" analagy. Do you honestly believe all that crap? You have a product to design, you either give it your all and make as much money from it as possible, or you go at it with a defeatus attitude and probably spoil it. You sound like the second category of programmers, correct me if I'm wrong.

Charles.

[Willem]

Originally posted by CharlesUFarley


Sure, but ask yourself a question should a major reputable game title or company for that matter require improvement from the community through a non-profit means? I personally think it's pretty rediculous for any proffesional game company to release a game that is supposed to uphold a standard, than apon realizing that the standard was dropped, and then out of the frustration everyone with programming knowledge comes rushing in and starts designing mod-kits to fix the various flaws that they left for us. I mean don't get me wrong, without those mods and their authors we wouldn't even bother with Civ3 again. My thanks goes out to them, but Firaxis should have provided those things in the first place.

Charles.

Here again, maybe Infrogrames just didn't give them enough time. Now maybe it's just PR, but it sounds to me that they are sincere about allowing players to design scenarios. But that ability would no doubt be the last thing that they develop. And keep in mind that Civ III is much more complex than version II, so there's a lot more opportunities for the program to do strange things, to the point of being unplayable. I understand that they didn't even get a chance to play-test the Modern Era, so they certainly wouldn't have had the time to test the scenario editor. What's worse, no scenario editor, or one that consistently crashes the program?

[yin26]

This is why I'm willing to consider the game once it's actually finished.

[Willem]

Originally posted by yin26
This is why I'm willing to consider the game once it's actually finished.

Well at least you're willing to keep an open mind about it now. So what, you had some sort of epiphany recently?