Way too much free information

[kmj]

Ok, I read your first post and found it insulting. You were critisizing an opinion. So I apologize for my next post and ignore your insults in the next one since you were just responding.

Fair enough; and I the same. I also apologize for coming across as insulting; hopefully you'll allow me to blame it on lack of sleep due to a certain game...


Boarders aren't lines on the ground that can be seen from the mountains. And I don't want to hear about abstract. I'm more concerned with realism on information. (granted realism takes a back seat in this game, but we can still discuss it)

This is definitely a preference issue... although removing them would make problems w/ diplomacy it seems (your army wandering up to an enemy city would (should) piss them off).


Knowing the best defender in a city without expending any resources to do that is something that I don't agree with.

How can you do this w/o spending money on "investigate city"? Did I miss something? If Top 5 or Wonders somehow allow you to see what units are in a city, well, then I agree that's silly. I don't recall any other way of gathering that info.

[b]
Meeting a civ for the very first time and knowing every city/tech/luxury/resource/treasury seems so unrealistic.
[b]
This is true, but I can see why they left it in... diplomacy would be a pain in the ass trying to guess what they have. Maybe if you have to establish an embassy first. (or perhaps if each civ could choose to "display" a subset of each, for bragging rights, or to initiate trades)... but then again I don't mind it since the current way simplifies gameplay, I think.

Of course, if you come from a multiplayer background you may be taking different things into consideration, which lead to different conclusions. In civ2 there were many "cheats" or tricks that I didn't take advantage of simply because it made the game less fun. In a multiplayer environment, things are different.

Ah, well. Again, I apologize for coming across as insulting.. the main reason for my abrasiveness (aside from lack of sleep) is due to the fact that there are so many people who act as if Fireaxis' only responsibility was to make them happy. There are alot of people to please, and overall, while there are things here and there that annoy me, it's still a great game, IMO.

[rah]

Garth Vader,
You hit that one on the head. Played it a few times and didn't particularly like it.
I liked the original MOO though.

DD, Thanks for the comments. I guess my real problem with seeing the borders is real early in the game you have the decision to explore in different directions (hut hunting) you move you scout to the top of a mountain and you see a border. If you're looking to explore virgin terrain you will move in the other direction. If you're trying to meet someone you move towards it. Without that border, you might have made the wrong decision and wasted moves going in the opposite direction. I guess I just feel like you got the info for free. This is a war game. (somewhat anyway) and Information is sometimes more important than troops. I would like the person that takes the extra effort to get the information to make a better decision be rewarded. Old school thinking I'm sure. You have to work for it.


KMJ
No problem. Again, I apologize, As long as you lack of sleep is from Playing
Don't get me wrong, I think the game has some good features.

I think you shouldn't see borders till you have contacted the civ. After that I agree that the borders provide a useful purpose.

You're right about the diplomacy somewhat, but I was definately thinking more along the MP lines, but it is an easy way to see what everyone has and plan your next path.
And seeing how many cities they have, their names and the order they were built in can be real useful.

You can see the best defender when you get near the city. In previous versions you had to send a spy in or actually attack the city to see what was defending.


RAH

[HalfLotus]

I was shocked when I clicked on an enemy stack and it showed me all their stats. How convenient. I don't like it.
Knowing all of a civs resources, techs, cities, etc. from the diplo screen in ridiculous.
I don't think you should be able to see others borders until you can see their city, or trade maps.

I dont want discovery and intelligence of the enemy abstracted. I want out find it out for myself, and strategize accordingly.

[Barry Brenesal]

I don't see any problem with all the info being presented, provided much of it could be toggled on or off. I seem to recall that some of these options were part of the control set in SMAC. Hopefully, that will be part of an early patch.

[Strollen]

I think in general Firaxis did a pretty good job in balancing playability and fog of war.

Border seem like an obvious addition, how do I know if I wandered into somebodies terrorities if there is not a line?

The best defender in a city is a good compomise since I don't know the more important information HOW MANY until I attack, or pay a lot of money. Compared to SMAC or CIV2 this is far more uncertainity.

Actually I find the espionage options in CIV3 to be so expensive they aren't worth doing. Probably cheaper just to rush build a couple of more units than to pay good money to see the defenses.

I think knowing about technological advances are probably unrealistic but again less info than the other Civ games. From a playability aspect, not knowing what resources or tech they have to trade would be pretty hard.

The top 5 cities and wonder building seems very reasonable. I am sure even in ancient times that rumors would travel far. "Do you know what the Egyptians are making these really big pointy buildings." My Uncle told me stories of a friends trip to the most amazing city called Athens it was filled with great temples, courthouse.....

[War4ever]

i agree that a patch should be used...... perhaps gaining extra info every twenty turns as a show of friendship and mutual borders...

after 20 turns you get to empire city count...

another 20 turns you get you get treasury count..

another 20 turns you get tech knowledge...

another 2o turns....something else... stack info/ military size....

this would reset to which ever stage in the peace treaty you were at........so that if you violated borders you lost your turns for a certain piece of ai embassy knowledge........

the ai is too passive.... but its better than the ai of MGE!

the view from the mountains is nice .... wood chopping isn't great.....

losing out on wonders is fun again


this game will not be an MP game..........not a good one anyways

[Thantos]

The problem with that war4weaver is that twenty turns is a very long time period even in the modern era were it is only 1 turn = 1 year and in the ancient era where each year represents decades of time. The pace of transfer would be down right glacial.

As far as the available information I dont really have a problem with it overall. Afterall it is only a rationalization to assume that your warrior in the mountains comes across a couple of goatherders who point them in the right direction for another civilization.

Neither do getting the unit specs bother me unduly after all it is either display the information in the open to see at a glance or force the player to consult the book for the unit stats, or worse yet leave the stats invisible completely and annoy the hell out of the players as they look for them in the program text files.

Knowing all of the units in a stack is probably a bit unrealistic but this simplification allowed them to spend coding time elsewear, and lets face it a lack of certain elements such as MP out of the box kind of tells me they were a bit more rushed for time than they would have liked.

As far as knowing the other sides techs and resources absolutely. A bit unrealistic but not so much that I feel that they would need to develope a much more detailed and code intensive work on it. Especially since it would detract from ease of play and speed of play. Not to mention being unrealistic in its own way. After all any major country in the world has a fairly good idea of what the other side has in at least an abstract sense if not an absolute sense. Even if you never want to trade tech for airplanes its kind of hard to hide a commericial airport between two cities for instance.

[rah]

My my my, quite a few different opinions.

I don't know how showing everything in a stack streamlines coding though?

But it does seem that a majority of the people find at least some of the free info unrealistic and undesirable. (stacks and diplo)

I'm surprised that no one said "since the AI knows all this stuff for free, why shouldn't I have the same capabilities"

It would be nice to see some removed in a patch. (or an option for those that like the crutch)

For MP, it's a must that something be done.

RAH

[kmj]

I think showing borders after contact would be a fine compromise. The same with wonder construction and completion, except that I think if a civ you contacted has contact w/ another civ, then you could know via word of mouth about that other civ's wonders.

[rah]

Yeah, I really have no problem with the wonders issue. Knowledge of the construction of a wonder is more likely to be realistic. The nearing completion is a bit iffy, (I always liked the surprise pimp job) but nothing worth argueing about.

Did you stay up last night playing too?
I'm heading to Vegas tomorrow so I have to get some sleep tonight, since I'm not planning on sleeping much there.

RAH

[barefootbadass]

I don't have the game yet but from what i have read about this 'free' info, I think all of it makes sense(in an abstracted sense) including what kind of units are in an enemy stack, except for the part of telling which units are elite or veteran. If a stack has some tanks in it, you can see them, quite easily and this is not unreasonable. But it is a little silly that just looking at them you could tell that they were seasoned fighters(although you might be able to guess it if they were 'beat up'(abstracted to the hp bar I guess).

[CharlotteCivver]

I would like to offer one point in the heated boreders conversation.

A border is not necessarily a national border like we have today. The border indicates that nation that has the most cultural influence on the area. This would be information that the area peasants would know about, so the scout would able to figure this out in his decade of scouting the area.

Imagine you had a scouting unit from Canada end up in Fargo, ND - a city that is really too small to be modelled in Civ. It might be in the cultural sphere of Minneapolis or Chicago/Milwaukee, I suppose.

If you went to somebody in Fargo, would they be able to tell you "I'm an American"? Of course they would. Similarly, folks across the border in Canada know that they are Canadian. If Canada's influence had not extended that far, they would at least know "I am NOT American!" but they would know if there were people nearby who are American.

I can certainly see where you would like an option to disable this functionality, but I really don't have a problem justifying it at all and I think it is a nice improvement. One improvement I really like over SMAC is that when you build a city near the border, the other country's borders do not suddenly implode.

[kmj]

The nearing completion is a bit iffy, (I always liked the surprise pimp job) but nothing worth argueing about.

I don't think the nearing completion is in CivIII; is it? 'Course, I don't remember because in the only game I've played I built every wonder except the Great Wall... Anyway, I read somewhere that it wasn't.



Did you stay up last night playing too?
I'm heading to Vegas tomorrow so I have to get some sleep tonight, since I'm not planning on sleeping much there.

Funny; actually, I beat the game at about 11, so for the first night, I went to bed at a decent hour... but I couldn't sleep so I stayed up and read through the manual until 1:30, picked up some interesting changes from civ2. Still much less tired, though. Good luck in Vegas.

[Garth Vader]

I don't think the nearing completion is in CivIII; is it?

No, but since you can't rush a wonder it doesn't really matter.

[Garth Vader]

I just remembered something about seeing the techs in the diplomacy screen.

I did a test yesterday. I checked to see what techs I could offer. There were only three even though I thought I was more advanced than that.

When I checked what they were they were all prereqs for later techs. I think they were electricity, medicine, steampower. I also had electronics, replacement parts, and some other advanced ones but they didn't show up on the list. I know they didn't have replacement parts because they had multiple rubber sources connected, but didn't know anything about that.

So I assume when you see what techs an AI can trade to you, they are only the ones you could research, not the ones you don't have the pre reqs for.