A software engineer´s answer to the 32+ civ issue

[Dom Pedro II]

quote: It is not -who and how many- the player can defeat... but -how fast!-

quote: a solution might be to give the ability for a civ to surrender. this was in smac, with the "be my ally or i'll kill you" proposition, and it saved lots of time spent in boring end-game wars...

Damn right! I hate wasting my time picking off the little guys as it is. Sending troops half-way across the world to invade yet another civilization... I don't like it. I can normally be lucky enough to wipe out 1 civ in the beginning, another one in the vicious mid-game war, and take big bites out of the remaining civs in the blitzkrieg war. I can never seem to take them all out before the space ship launch.

I like the idea of being able to control them by the threat of force like with the SMAC idea. And I would like to dominate them economically to prevent them from ever attacking me toward the end of the game.

[Dom Pedro II]

Why does anybody want 32 civs anyway? Thats alot. Do you want it for playing the normal game or so you can have more countries when doing a scenario? I know that I sometimes wish I had a ninth or tenth civ when doing a scenario, but 32? 24 civs I can see.

The fact is that in a general game, they would be a tremendous pain. It would be like having little Barbarian civilizations that stop your city progress at every chance. You'd spend so much time beating them back or dealing diplomatically with them that you'd have no time for anything else. Stick with 24, it is at least a more managable number.

But isn't there at least some hope of improving the AI while stretching it out over 24 civs and still come out with a somewhat smarter AI??

[rremus]

As I replied in the CTP group, I'm sure the computer resources needed to deal with 32+ civs are already here. The problem is indead if the human player can deal 32 civ (or more).

[Ralf]

quote: Originally posted by rremus on 11-06-2000 03:37 AM As I replied in the CTP group, I'm sure the computer resources needed to deal with 32+ civs are already here.

Its already a confirmed fact that CTP-2 only includes max 8 civs. And thats not only a wise decision - it an absolutely necessary one, seen from a mathematical, technical and practical point of view. And its *very* unlikely that Firaxis Civ-3 is going to include more then 7-10 civs. After all, the same testing/debugging rules applies to Firaxis- as well as for Activision-team. Pyaray CTP-2 staff-member quote:

"I do understand your points of "well if we want to go ahead and let it take a long time, then we should have that choice". But, we can't release a game that we haven't tested everything in. If we were to increase the number of civs by 2, it would nearly double our testing time, and that's something we can't afford to do. There are already a ton of people (whom I fundamentally disagree with) that say we don't test enough. This would just add to the problem. Would you all really want us to add a completely untested feature?".

That pretty much sums it up.

The guy deals with this stuff on a daily basis, on a exact same type of game-project as the Firaxis team. What more is there to say?

Now dont get me wrong - i really WANT more AI-civ competition. I just rather want it in terms of a 3-4 big well-developed quality-empires + 3-5 potent smaller ones (with help of anti-BAB). I just *dont* want to be confronted with 20-30+ buckloads of Portugal-sized, lame and unresponsive quantity-empires.

[This message has been edited by Ralf (edited November 06, 2000).]